Sending More Troops to Iraq

[gagged_Louise]

As George W Bush went on an official visit to Britain in late 2003 - greeted by a wave of peacefully disapproving rallies - I saw a superb cartoon on the web, in three pic frames:

Bush and Blair are visting the Queen's London residnece and Blair tells Bush "These Buckingham Palace guards never flinch."

Bush whispers to the guard his side of the story: "Saddam had WMD and was gonna use them"

Guard in bear cap breaks into a fit of laughter, and Blair tells Bush "I stand corrected."

I agree with DM that the whole WMD thing has been a hoax, an excuse, and so was the supposed link to al-Qaeda. Saddam was a secular dictator, not a religious one: his regime hunted down people they saw as dangerous islamists/shiites and they would have hanged Osama bin-laden if he had been found in Iraq sometime in the ´90s. And of course there was no question about the US military advantage; who would have doubted that the US would be able to topple Saddam in 90 days at any time after 2000 if only given the room to wage the war full-on? (compare: who would doubt Russia could mow down any of its neighbours if it weren't ultimately checked by any other force, by NATO or by treaties?) But it's one thing to win the war, in military terms, and another to win peace. Bush and Pentagon seem to be doing neither, these days.