Why did we invade Iraq?
Even if you're able to forgive bush and his cronies for putting us so deeply in debt that it will take generations to dig us out, the wanton and needless killing and maiming of so many Americans and others is just unforgivable.
Especially since vets ow have to keep fighting for every little crumb they get.
Iraq worked to build a nuclear arsenal starting in the 1960s. At the behest of then-VP Saddam Hussein, the 1970s saw Iraq establish a nuclear weapons program through 1991. Following his ouster in Kuwait, Hussein was anything but truthful about his nuclear program. He vacillated between threatening allied powers that he was close to completion of his program and playing a shell game with the UN inspectors about his true state of nuclear readiness that he claimed he was working on every time the issue popped up. It is known that by 1991 Iraq had created a robust, covert program that included a complete, although untested, nuclear weapon design and roughly 36.3 kilograms of weapons useable HEU as research reactor fuel. Later on, it could not be established that Hussein actually had what he said he had. Some construed it as it never existed, while others construed that he had successfully hoodwinked the UN Inspectors. There is the possibility it is a state secret as a political device to control public opinion. I do not know.
At any rate, legally, when someone claims they are armed with a specific type of weapon, the person they fooled who retaliates is not responsible for the avaricious lie in thinking the truth was established by his testimony. Saddam made egregious claims he was unstoppable, which gave pause to his enemies. After his particularly egregious aggression to expatriate Kuwaitis for the oil he would gain in conquest was snuffed, his behaviors toward Americans were so unthinkable that Secretary of State Madeline Albright established in her State Department notes a considerable resource for those who wanted to know on the War Crimes of Saddam Hussein. They amounted to his regular political decimation of around 60,000 human lives off the face of the planet for daring to bar his aggressive tendencies.
He established rape rooms and put his bloodthirsty sons, Uday and Qusay in charge, who regularly took the families of his adversaries, and raped the women while the men watched, sometimes just killing the broken-hearted husband who'd just watch his wife raped and possibly maimed, and sometimes killing all of them in the most gruesome means possible, depending on his whim, no trials, either.
After his agreement to stop using WOMDs on the Kurds in Iraq, mass graves were still needed for those other means he used to take out his political adversaries, real and imagined.
Even so, I well recollect reports of his claims of having nukes well into the months following 9/11 and the particular horror of hearing how he was paying off families of homicidal maniac bombing and killing Israeli citizens with checks in the amount of $25,000, and if they got an American killed, the amount was increased to double that ($50,000.)
He said he had nukes, Madeline Albright's notes said he had nukes, he repeated it over and over, until, guess what. In addition to Interpol information and our own intelligence, all we could surmise was that not only did Saddam Hussein likely have nukes, he needed to stop the massive killing of neighbors and Iraqi citizens, because he wasn't satisfied until tens of thousands of people were murdered to sate his tyrannically insecure appetite that his own people did not love him. IOW, he was a madman and unworthy of ruling a country with 26,000,000 people living in it.
And due to his aggression against American citizens in his country and history of trying to assassinate prominent Americans, the lot fell onto the president at the time, President George W. Bush, who reluctantly went to the UN with the best information he had, delivered by Colin Powell, who apparently agreed enough with that information from information we had on Saddam dating back several blood-filled decades to do whatever it took to stop nukes from proliferating in the Middle East with all that talk of wiping people off the face of the map long preceding the nut Ahmadinejad of Iran who took up where Saddam Hussein left off, for approbation from other nutcases in the Middle East, not to mention a few in Washington using the entire war for political takeover of a schema to redistribute wealth in America, which would decimate our role as peace-through-strength measures.
I don't think we can exactly beat up on any one President for blocking America-haters in the world considering the alternative of a motivated-to-snuff-the-earth bunch led by an Ahmadinejad, who once held his foot on an American serviceman, shot him through the temple, and kicked him off an Airplane when Jimmy Carter was president (not blaming Carter for this atrocity, BTW).
I've lived the years through all of this as many of you have. The only difference is that I made copious notes of Madeline Allbright, thought she was a good lady to call America's attention to the atrocities and war crimes of Saddam Hussein, she just couldn't convince her boss over his Commie wife's protests that he should do something about Iraq that was so severe Hussein would be emasculated. Bombing the empty aspirin factor had just the opposite effect, but I'm not faulting any one person for not knowing that in advance. The people who know these kind of things are called Generals, and the military men were all but ignored, which is a crying shame.
That's why we should put stronger men into the office of presidency, and not philanderers and treasury-ambitious targeters of taxpayers' hard-earned moneys that should go to America's defense, while Americans are encouraged to become productive citizens and not sponges.
Oh! thats right 
Reagan 
I thought Texans were AGAINST crony capitalism (see Halliburton & BlackWater)
