Miles unlike the obviously crazy atomu, who probably needs a brain transplant or at least an A for irrelevance, you at least grappled with the data.
If you read more carefully you will find I'm saying that the Americans who earlier had supported Saddam against Iran had begun to change their tune in 1984-1985 when Rumsfeld signalled to Saddam that the Americans were getting upset by his regime's human rights abuses.
I suggest you google Gosden's testimony before those Senate Committees, it was heart wrenching stuff which had a profound effect on the hearers, and it was one of those turning points in Congress's thinking about Iraq.
Then you need to read the ILA 1998 to realise that it was not merely Halabja but the way in which Saddam's secret police state terrorised "friend" and foe alike. The barbaric recent behaviour and indiscriminate targeting of Iraqi civilians, by some elements of the contemporary insurgency, gives one an insight into what Saddam's "terrorist" state was like. The difference then being that similar acts were performed by an arm of the state viz.the Secret Police as well as his Fayadeen militias.
No Miles it was not just Halabja but a long history of state terrorism, ethnic cleansing programs in the north , Marsh Arabs displacement in the south and the massacre of the shiites who rose up against Saddam after the first gulf war.That does not exhaust the list as you know. And of course that (Kuwait) war. All of that was what the US Congress became familiar with and which helped produce the ILA 1998.
If you are unaware of this history of a growing anti-Saddam bias that developed up til 1998, then beyond, you will never understand why the Congress, GOP and Democrat alike, gave Bush, the Green light to remove Saddam, in a Congress vote in October 2002. The NIE October 2002 report on closer examination did have some flaws that I suggest were overlooked by Congress because it was already in the mood to remove Saddam.
I did a bit of googling when the thought occurred to me just prior to the invasion that even if Saddam had WMD and tried to use them against the US he and Iraq would be history in a flash. So when I found the ILA 1998, I realised that the US Congress already had Saddam on the "remove from office" list well before Bush came to office and before 9/11.
It's unlikely Clinton, who failed miserably in response to the Rwandan crisis would do anymore than send those few missiles into Baghdad as in Dec 1998, that killed a few innocent civilians as his response to the ILA but in Bush we had a bit of a maddie who took the ILA seriously and probably assumed the framers meant what they said about removing Saddam. I see 9/11 as providing a political environment that enabled the goal of the ILA to be more quickly effected.
Further you need to read Hillary's Oct. 2002 Senate speech, in which she gave Bush the OK to take out Saddam, to understand why American lefties call her the 20 foot Queenie and consider her as much a militarist, in the thrall of the US industrial/military complex as they do Bush.
So what I'm saying Miles is that my little theory is backed up by the last few decades of US Congress history and helps explain much including why the netroots US anti-war movement ,even with Pelosi and Reid in charge of the House and Senate has been going backwards in their attempts to stop the "civil" war and bring the troops home.
