Not according to Saddam Hussein in December 2002 as the UN inspections were getting started.
Also SH had his liason to the UN, invite the CIA into Iraq to find something if they thought it was there.
That also does not fit with your claim about what Saddam Hussein ‘thought’.
Indeed. And so were the after-invasion ones.
Just to name a couple:
Useful Idiots: How many of you still think invading Iraq was a good idea?
Bushbots, since I can’t ask for your brains, get yer asses in here…
So, how many of you dolts don’t know about the PNAC…
Can’t say why I remember them 
but I do remember The Pit being much more “fun” then, than it is now.
Must say, I always posted back then (prior to the invasion) hoping against hope that all the evidence against the invasion was wrong. But I was right unfortunately. I understand the OP, it’s not about gloating but rather about not being sheeple…
Back then I was no too much involved in the forum, I was actually protesting. It was sad that it made no difference.
I did take part later on many threads denouncing the stupidity after the invasion, but I did make it clear that I though it was a mistake to go to war in a thread about anti-war and classic protest songs that needed to be used once again.
I did go against tradition and suggested Men At Work – It’s A Mistake. The original target seems to have been Ronald Reagan and the cold war, but it made me think of the misguided dumbo commander in chief of 2003 and the message that the protesters world wide attempted to tell him: that it was a mistake.
Whoa, get ready to feel old, that song from the MTV era is now 30 years old… 
The lesson is, “Read James Fallows”. Understand that threat inflation exists: the Cuban Missile Crisis is the only post WWII example where things were worse than the government indicated. Every other time it was the other way around. So the next time war is called for, discount the alleged threat by a hefty margin.
Here’s a list of other things we won’t learn:
[QUOTE=James Fallows]
3) The recurring pattern of error. When politicians and the media were “wrong” about Iraq, what did wrongness entail? Reduced to its essence it meant:
[ul]
[li] Exaggerating the scale and imminence of a threat from Iraq;[/li] [li] Growing testily impatient with any solutions other than the “kinetic” (e.g., from TNY 10 years ago, “a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all.”);[/li] [li] Grossly underestimating the difficulty of “removing” that threat with military force;[/li] [li] Showing a failure of tragic imagination (different from a tragic failure of imagination, which was also true) about the ripple effects and long-term costs and consequences of taking a clear and “decisive” step now. [/ul][/li]
If we were to “learn” from mistakes, we might avoid this specific set of biases and miscalibrations when it comes to another “preventive” strike against another threatening nation in exactly the same part of the world. But we see every one of these four elements of this syndrome – exaggeration, impatience, polyanna-ism about military measures, naivete about long-term effects - in discussions about the “need” and “moral duty” to condone military action against Iran.
[/QUOTE]
The bolded parts, added by me, is what you should look out for.
More mea culpas from Ezra Klein: "I supported the Iraq War and I’m sorry." You see he supported Kenneth Pollack’s Iraq War and figured that GWBush’s team would be a decent approximation of the same. Bad move. If the Executive Branch happens to be packed with incompetent hacks it matters. In fact it can make the difference between “Smart to support” and “Smart to oppose”, although not in the case of Iraq IMO. Yes, this will involve an assessment tinged by partisanship. But that fact doesn’t contradict its necessity.
I wasn’t around this board in those days, but I took loads of shit from others for sticking to my position that whether or not Saddam had WMD’s or not was of no consequence.
WMD’s were always a bogeyman, whether or not they actually existed. In what sense was owning such devices a justification for war? I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t get why so many people point to the fact that the WMD’s weren’t found as the ultimate damnation of the whole effort. What the hell could Saddam have done with them even if he had them? We were already sanctioning and no-flying the bejesus out of the place.
Rattling the rocks in Afghanistan was sadly necessary after 911, but an invasion of Iraq was never anything but foolish regardless of how many aluminum tubes were discovered in someone’s basement.
It does bear repeating, however, that 10 years ago there was broad support amongst the US public for the invasion of Iraq. There was broad support in the media, and in the Congress. All of this support was centered around the bogeyman that Saddam had WMD’s. 10 years later I am still chilled by the evidence that an entire population can be moved to lethal folly by nothing more than an appeal to phantom threat.
Reading aubries’ “Damn fool war” thread is eye-opening.
Particularly the folks who claim to be fans of Cecil’s work but are dismayed and disgusted with Cecil injecting his personal opinion of the war into his own writings, and how they’ll trust him as being unbiased a lot less in the future. From thelark, who from post number 4 trumpeting the virtues of the war and shaming Cecil, to Marsupial’s message from deep in bizarro-world USA in post 16, to hajario wondering how this war was in any way like Vietnam. Post 145 sums up just how ridiculously short-sighted the pro-war crowd were.
Short-sighted as in, “…six days, six weeks. I doubt six months”.
thelark just in general making the whole thread a barrel of laughs. Sad laughs, but laughs nonetheless. Going over braintree’s posts as one of the few beacons of sanity in a clearly dumb universe. And of course Cecil, who shows up and addresses the only pertinent question posed all thread.
Thanks for posting that link. Was one of the more interesting reads I’ve seen in a while.
Those who were against the war should be honest enough to say they are in favor of brutal dictators
who murdered hundreds of thousands of people, tried to acquire WMD, suppressed basic freedoms and paid bounties every time a terrorist killed an Israeli. Whenever you find a brutal mass murderer: Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Husseing…you will find a liberal licking his boots.
There are lots of them out there. Should we just put them in order and start going to war with all of them?
False dichotomy, Son. Certainly not up to the standards of debate of Jim.
Those who think this is a sensible argument should be honest enough to wear a dunce cap at all times.
The converse of that argument is that those who supported the war should be honest enough to say that they support the loss of nearly 5,000 American lives.
Do you get to support the war and oppose the loss of American life?
Then we get to oppose the war and oppose a terrible dictator.
Looking at the Freedom House index, there are 47 nations classified as non-free. Better get those tanks rolling!
Lets not go for even older than 30 years logical fallacies.
The modern variation that you are using is almost the same as Terrorism-baiting.
And one should not ever forget that it is very likely that the number of civilians dead as a consequence of the invasion was much bigger than just 100,000 (100,000 is in itself an unjustifiable number and no, not just the much maligned Lancet surveys were the only ones that arrived to a larger number)
Oh man, you totally called me out here. Go oppression! Autocrats FTW!
This is not an argument.
And “Husseing”? Who da’ fuck is that?
It’s the participle form of Hussy, of course.
:smack: And here I though it was a murderous Chinese dish!
I wasn’t part of the SDMB at the time but I was on another board. I hated the Iraq war because I felt it was ill-defined and murky and took our attention away from Afghanistan. Never did I believe in the stupid WMD reasoning. The fault of that came from Bush’s own mouth. First it was because of 9/11, which was false, then it was humanitarian reasons, then it was WMD. I think the night before the invasion, Bush went on TV and said that if Saddam left, he wouldn’t attack Iraq. Those shifting goalposts and unclear objectives told me all I needed to know about what we’re really in Iraq for and made me very skeptical about the whole thing. It was not comfortable being against the war in 2003, many people took a lot of shit for it
I guess I expect more from my leaders than to cower like that. If not invading was the right thing to do, even if it would have lost them the election, I would hope that they would have refrained from it. Sure, we were devastated, sure we were humiliated, but throwing a tantrum is what a child does, not the most powerful country in the world.
Plus, if Bush and co. had been truthful from the beginning, I think surgical strikes and small-scale attacks could have been widely supported. We didn’t need to invade Afghanistan, a barely-together country run by religious fanatics.
The initial invasion of Afghanistan toppled the Taliban government and was fine. Control should have been turned over quickly to existing non-Taliban leaders (yes, many were corrupt – what else is new?) and large funds should have been provided with few strings attached to build goodwill and help the Afghan people.
Instead Afghanistan had to be turned into yet another Friedmanist experiment, based on “creative destruction,” and with local politics bypassed to install an American-selected leader. Even worse, Afghan laborers and companies were bypassed in infrastructure-building contracts, to maximize graft for buddies of the Cheney-Rove Administration.
Anyone who has anything good to say about post-invasion U.S. behavior in Iraq or Afghanistan is under-informed.