That's the thing though, even if Iraq still had WMD's (including U.S. and other Western/NATO countries supplied WMD), who cares? Many countries have some kind of WMD program. I don't see us hounding ourselves or the Israelis, the British, the French about WMD's. Obviously, those being routinely hounded for it are not on our team, they are Them and we are Us.
If it is a geopolitical argument, that Iraq's WMD's posed an existential threat to the U.S. homeland, it would be preferable to have argued that Iraq had the technical capability to launch and strike the homeland. That was not the case that was fervently pitched. It was the more vague and hypothetical case that was argued -- Saddam could have WMD's smuggled into the U.S.
If Iraq could do it, what's stopping the Russians, the Chinese and the North Koreans from doing the very same thing? The answer from the Iraq narrative is 1) nothing, which is followed by 2) they need to be invaded too! That is not a logical geopolitical move considering that the consequences of a full frontal against any of those three nations constitutes death at an unprecedented scale in the history of human warfare.
There is, however, a logical explanation to the decision to invade Iraq: the ideologues in power at the time of the invasion. Under the leadership of these ideologues, had the Iraq campaign gone smoother, Syria and Iran were next on the chopping block. Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Somalia were other invasion-needed countries and in some circles among the ideologues, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were on the list too.
So in a sense, the disastrousness of the Iraq war prevented a much large disaster from being opened up.
What is worrisome that many of the ideologues who lead us into Iraq have never stopped campaigning their cause. War is on their mind. If they get POTUS in the next election, war is the prescription that is being written. Debunkers here will have fun defending President Jeb Bush when some event drags us headlong into another enormously costly war.
