Justification for the Iraq War

Yesterday in class we talked about what we knew about the Iraq War. In answer to the question, how many students in this class believe that there was some kind of link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11? half of the class raised their hands.

This is obviously a very important question when it comes to the justification for the Iraq War. Once again, it is very instructive to turn to Wikipedia, this time their extensive page on Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. According to this resource, "The intelligence community (CIA, NSA, DIA, etc) view, confirmed by the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission Report and the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq, is that there was not a cooperative effort between the two and that Saddam did not support the 9/11 attacks." And, "the joint FBI-INS-police PENTBOM investigation, the FBI program of voluntary interviews and numerous other post-9-11 inquiries, together comprising probably the most comprehensive criminal investigation in history—chasing down 500,000 leads and interviewing 175,000 people -- has turned up no evidence of Iraq's involvement; nor has the extensive search of post-Saddam Iraq by the Kay and Duelfer commission and US troops combing through Saddam’s computers."

Michigan's senator, Carl Levin, has stated, "The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq. The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war."

Another question that came up in class was did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction, specifically nuclear weapons? Wikipedia also has an extensive page on this question. Another very interesting person arguing about the presence of weapons of mass destruction is Scott Ritter, former head of the United Nations weapons investigating team in Iraq.

The same argument is now being used to present an argument that Iran is preparing nuclear weapons.