Why?

We had no defense treaty with Kuwait. And Kuwait is no democracy. Last I checked, organized political parties were banned there and it was technically illegal to build any house of worship besides a mosque. There was no good reason for America to take the lead in defending Kuwait. (Oil was a bad reason.) I’d have felt bad about an occupied Kuwait, but the other Arab governments should have figured out how to deal with one of their own.

And if we had not fought the Gulf War, and in particular if we had never stationed troops in Saudi Arabia, the Twin Towers would probably still be standing today. (Though again, it’s not like we can turn back the clock and run a controlled experiment.)

And yes it’s interesting that Saddam (at least) boasted of wanting to kill Bush 41 before invading Kuwait. (He actually hatched a plot after Clinton became president but it was foiled.)

I don’t know that he was only a threat to Israel. If he decided to annex another nearby country there would have been a need to go to war against him again anyway. Better on American terms than on his terms.

As for fighting the jihadists on “terms on our choosing”, I consider the flypaper theory to be bunk. It’s like saying that we’re creating a swamp to fight the malaria-spreading mosquitos on our own terms.

Maybe you’re worried that if America pulled out then al-Qaeda types would somehow take over Iraq, the way they aligned themselves with the Taliban in Afghanistan. That seems most unlikely. A far more likely scenario is that the Shi’ites would start crushing the Sunnis in a very gruesome fashion, and that would be that. And if the Shi’ites couldn’t crush the Sunnis on their own, they’d do it with help from the Iranians.

(BTW, I supported the initial invasion of Iraq because I thought Saddam posed a long-term threat to Israel. And I still support the war because I think it’s still possible to give Iraq a soft landing into a creakily-functioning pseudo-democracy, a la Lebanon, though my patience is wearing thin. But I did not consider Saddam to be much of a threat to any democracy besides Israel, and I think what we’ve learned since the invasion suggests I was right, though it’s not like we can turn back the clock and run a controlled experiment.)

As for the present campaign in Iraq, it is the central front of the war on the jihadist terrorists. Remember them? I could explain it to you in detail, but that would take up too much of Meryl’s resources. Suffice it to say the invading Iraq allowed the US to fight the terrorists on ground and terms of our own choosing, not their’s. We cannot win against them by standing on the defensive, since we would have to defend literally everything. The Iraq Campaign allowed us to take the initiative and force our enemies to respond to our moves, not we to the enemy’s moves.

We also must fight them ideologically, to pit our big idea against their big idea of the world-wide Caliphate. Our big idea is liberty and prosperity in the modern world, even if the tongue-tied Bush Administration is better at promoting this than explaining it. Here again, Iraq was the logical place in the Middle East to start this push.

Oh, and one of the reasons the Arabs hate Israel so much is that Israel really is a Western country. That’s what they mean when Arabs fulminate against Israel as an outpost of Imperialism. That many in the West, especially among the leftists, are so willing to throw Israel to the wolves is not evidence that Israel is not part of the West, it is evidence that many in the West are moral cretins.

The article notes that in 1990 Saddam promised Arafat that he would use chemical weapons against Israel. But of course when the Gulf War took place Saddam did not use chemical weapons against Israel.

Basically all the article shows is that Saddam was interested in sponsoring anti-Israeli terrorism and that he once promised the moon to Arafat but never delivered. Neither revelation is particularly surprising. The bit about the meeting between Saddam and Arafat is interesting, but hardly a major scoop.

And even if you think that “what was possibly prevented” justified invading Iraq, it doesn’t justify staying in there now, when Saddam and his sons are dead and the Ba’athist regime destroyed beyond any hope of resurrection.

You don’t take action against a potential threat, because nothing has been done yet. And after the attack happens, it’s too late to do anything. And a history of prior attacks is no reason to assume that there will be any future attacks.

Your only possible action is to defend yourself while the attack is in progress. Failure to do that will make you cruel and evil. But taking action at any other time makes you an imperialist conquerer.

At least that’s the only logical explanation for why the press reports things the way they do.

Either that or they simply side with the terrorists and dictators of the world. Which wouldn’t surprise me either.