SADDAM AND PERSONAL SURVIVAL

As Chris Matthew Sciabarra points out in the post directly below personal survival held great importance for Saddam Hussein. I would go even further saying it was by far his number one, most likely his lone, priority. Not only did he have a plethora of tunnels he also had many doubles. He could not follow his natural instinct and flee Iraq because after what we did to the Taliban for giving Bin Laden sanctuary no other country would have taken him. We did not find him out leading an insurgency to recapture his country, we found him hiding in a hole in the ground.

If we accept the above point then the justification for the invasion is even further diminished. Whether or not Hussein had weapons of mass destruction has always been an irrelevant point. Even if he did still have them, to use them against America would have been an act of suicide by the least suicidal man on the planet. We could have easily traced any use of such weapons back to him because we provided him with such capabilities that he had back in the 1980s when he was one of our best friends fighting one of our worst enemies Iran.

Some of the neocon commentators suggest that we are in a new world war with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. If this true, what are we doing wasting enormous resources and precious lives in a country that was never a threat to us in the first place? I have no doubt that the fall and capture of Saddam Hussein is a good thing for the Iraqi people. However, the job of our government is not to make the Iraqi people happy, the job of our government is to make the American people safer and when George Bush invaded Iraq he was not doing his job.