True. Bush wasn't certain that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction. In fact, it would have made sense for Saddam to pursue a WMD program given his aggressive tendencies and many enemies.
But it looks like Bush probably cherry picked faulty intelligence to justify a decision that was made long before 9/11. This is why key members of his defense team wrote "Rebuilding America's Defenses"
in the 90s, wherein regime in Iraq was an absolute imperative. It's also why Clinton made it an official policy of the U.S. in 1997. Many key Democrats supported regime change based on the arguments the necons gave in the 90s. [Does the OP know those arguments? Does the OP know why Chaney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz lobbied Clinton so hard for the removal of Hussein? ]
Paul Pillar of the CIA said this:
”The atmosphere in which they were working, in which a policy decision clearly had already been made, in which intelligence was being looked to to support that decision rather to inform decisions yet to be made, was a very important part of the atmosphere.”
Powell said this:
“I wonder what will happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end of the other and find nothing.”
As CBS News reported in 2009, “barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq.”
For my part, I think the reason the U.S. wouldn't invaded say Russia or North Korea
is because these nations have nukes. And the reason the U.S. did invade Iraq is because they were reasonably certain that Saddam didn't have WMDs. Had Saddam possessed nukes, than an invasion would have resulted in either the loss of Israel or some other mass casualty event. The U.S. would never have risked invading Iraq if they thought Saddam had nukes to launch.
Here is what NC says is needed to invade a country
safely
It must be virtually defenseless.
It must be important enough to be worth the trouble
There must be a way to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.
The Downing Street Memo
“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” the secret memo reads. “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
The OP should be commended for his service and pitied for his partisanship. While I agree with much of his post, it reads like someone whose universe unfolds from this fact: he likes Bush and hates Obama. Sadly, we need more than party loyalty to analyze this stuff.
The OP is encouraged to at least try an understand why regime change in Iraq was the chief goal of the Bush defense team from the beginning.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3249.htm
The OP is encouraged to click this link below and read this policy paper. It makes a pretty persuasive case for regime change, and it was used by Chaney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to convince Clinton that regime change was 100% necessary.
http://www.slideshare.net/UnitB166E...t-for-the-new-american-century-september-2000