So now you're saying that its good to finally remove him now? I think you're confused about what should be done here. I don't really care when he did it, it's his history that all adds up, and clearly you are ignoring my points about him demonstrating intent, and also breaking the multiple realisations which supported it.
And on your note of WMD's:
"The war with Saddam Hussein did not actually begin in March 2003, as you well know. It began with his 1991 annexation of Kuwait, which was reversed by the U.S.-led intervention and whereupon his insane plans for a nuclear weapons system, among other things, were exposed. With his army crushed and on the run it would have been relatively straightforward to remove him there and then, but the debate was instead won by the realpolitik crowd (e.g. Kissinger/Scowcroft types who were also not-coincidentally against the 2003 war). In what has turned out to be one of the worst mistakes of American statecraft in recent decades, Saddam was confirmed in power and his gunships were left to re-establish their genocidal control over Iraq. In exchange for this, of course, were the sanctions and the WMD inspections. The Iraqis could have been spared 10 more years of tyranny and starvation under Saddam, but instead they had to face another campaign of slaughter (the gunships proved useful) in the 1991 uprisings against him, while there were still thousands of U.S. troops still on Iraqi soil, sometimes close enough to watch. At least the coalition forces imposed a no-fly zone over Kurdistan, effectively liberating the Kurds from Saddam, but even then the Iraqi forces fired on the planes patrolling the no-fly zone almost every single day for the next 10 years.
From then on the story of Saddam's demented regime is generally well-known. He had flagrantly violated almost every single call to inspections, and terrorized his own scientists into non-compliance with inspection teams. One of these scientists was Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, who was actually instructed to bury a nuclear centrifuge (which is the absolutely key piece of equipment for the enrichment of uranium) and blueprints in his garden and revealed them to coalition forces in 2003. (For more info on this and on scientists inside Iraq during the sanction period, see The Bomb in My Garden
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-...studies/studies/vol48no4/bombs_in_garden.html).
Then there was the well-documented attempt to buy illegal missile delivery systems off-the-shelf from North Korea in Syria as late as February 2003, one month before the invasion. Also interesting is the fact that Wissam Zahawi, the then-diplomatic envoy at the Vatican and one of Saddam's former chief envoys in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger at about the same time that A.Q. Khan was there as well. (A.Q. Khan is, if you don't know, the notorious Pakistani black market proprietor that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea and quite probably to Syria as well.) Now while that doesn't exactly prove anything, what is the likelihood that Iraq's top European envoy and a senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer simultaneously chose an off-season holiday in a country known primarily for its production of yellowcake uranium... In fact, there actually were WMDs (about 5000 chemical warheads) found in Iraq after the intervention, as a recent New York Times report chronicles. (
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...t/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html) While they were not 100% modern and weaponized, they still contained dangerous materials and could have easily been turned into some other kind of chemical weapon. More importantly, they reaffirm the fact that Iraq was in direct and unquestionable breach of every single UN disarmament resolution, and yet there are still people today who say that the words 'Iraq' and 'WMD' cannot be mentioned in the same sentence...
The fact that Iraq's concealment efforts and its consistent obstruction of inspection teams itself constituted a most serious breach of international resolutions and agreements is indisputable. What's even more unbelievable though, is the massive campaign of corruption and bribery undertaken by Iraq within and outside the UN. Rolf Ekéus, the Swedish Social Democrat and director of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq between 1991 and 1997, was offered by Tariq Aziz (deputy Prime Minister) in person, to his face, a bribe of a million and a half dollars to change his inspection report. In other words: "It's the tip of the iceberg of what the Iraqis were offering. For every official like Ekéus who turned down a bribe, there are many more who will have been tempted by it." (
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...485500/Saddams-2m-offer-to-WMD-inspector.html).
Where did this money come from? It was siphoned off from the UN Oil-for-Food programme, put in place to alleviate the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions. The level of corruption surrounding this programme is simply astounding, ranging from corporations to political officials, including very serious allegations against (amazingly) a sitting member of British parliament, George Galloway. There is no question that this can be added, along with Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, to the long list of UN failures. Impossible to ignore too is the fact that while Saddam had embezzled over 1 and a half billion dollars from this scheme, ordinary Iraqis lived in poverty and in dire want of basic medical supplies, and it is estimated by UNICEF that up to 500,000 Iraqi children died needlessly as a result. The usual anti-war crowd protested, unsurprisingly, in order to have the sanctions lifted. What sort of pseudo-humanitarianism is this? Surely the lifting of sanctions can only be enabled by the removal of the regime that necessitates them? But when confronted with this possibility, the same people fell silent, apparently preferring the status quo.. ('sure, Iraqi lives are important, but not THAT important')."
