I usually have a lot of sympathy for feminists, despite the fact that most of them seem to be left-wing moonbats. This is an example of when I lose it. My President for life Sheelzebub (I am her humble Minister for Olive Oil) aka the Pinko Feminist Hellcat, has a rant about the Downing Street Memo which concludes with the following:
But here's the thing--even if Saddam had warheads and missiles and whatnot, an invasion would have been a monumentally stupid idea. You mean to tell me that invading a nation run my a madman who gasses his own people is smart? Helloooo. He'd happily detonate one of his nukes or unleash a biological or chemical agent and shrug off any civilian deaths.
Besides which, we've got the biggest arsenal on the planet--and we haven't been afraid to use it. Take a trip to Hiroshima or Nagasaki if you have your doubts.
I'm sure George and his merry band of sycophants knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, which is why they desperately wanted to spike the intel. This wasn't about WMD's, or the war on terrorism, or bringing democracy to Iraq.
This is wrong on so many levels that it is hard to know where to begin, but we'll try the beginning. Firstly the invasion of a WMD armed Iraq was a truly excellent idea because the lack of cooperation with the WMD inspections were precisely what Hussein was doing that violated the cease-fire at the end of the first gulf war. It is true that Hussein could have tried to use his WMDs to stop the invasion, if he had had any working ones, but the fact that he would have killed his own citizens without doing much harm to the invaders had he done so is not a reason to not invade. He had after allalready killed a few hundred thousand of his own people as well as millions of Iranians (and quite a few Kuwaitis - not sure of the number) so what assurance was there that he wouldn't do the same again. Removing Hussein from power was the only way to be sure that he wouldn't do so again.
Secondly, the fact that the US did not in fact drop a nuclear device on Baghdad is surely evidence that, in fact, the US is unwilling to use such weapons when it doesn't need to. I expect that there was a contingency plan to drop a nuclear bomb on Baghdad as part of some worst case scenario but I am sure there was no desire to do so. Had there been such a desire why wasn't the bomb dropped? BTW with regard to Hiroshima and Nagasaki it is clear that there was considerable reluctance to drop the bombs but that it was considered to be the least bad option - see Plunge's excellent essays.
Thirdly, if it was in fact all about oil and control then the scorched earth policy would have been far better. If the US government really wanted to control the oil then by far the best way to have done so would have been to bomb the country into the stone age and use deadly force any and every time someone attacked or even looked like attacking. In fact of course the number of civilian casualties during the invasion were minimal and the destruction trivial compared to the destruction wrought by 30 or more years of Ba'athins rule. It it wasn't about democracy then why the heck did the US actually hold some elections and install a government. They didn't have to. They could have ignored everyone and just stayed there.
I would never claim that the implentation of the post-invasion operations in Iraq have been perfect. In fact it is obvious that there have been errors, however I do believe that the strategy has been proven to be correct.
PS next up will be a post that is more sympathetic to the Pinko and her fellow feminists