by Rich Browne

Created on: July 06, 2008

Revisiting History

Did President George W. Bush lie to the American people in order to go to war in Iraq? No. He relied on what was considered, at the time, as the best available information.

Was the Iraq War necessary? Given the context of the time, it probably was.

Was the Iraq War executed well? Obviously not, or the U.S. would not still have so many troops there.

Why was the Iraq War necessary?

To answer this question we have to slip back in time and review the complex set of circumstances that led up to the invasion.

First, what was there about the regime of Saddam Hussein that made U.S. leaders think it was time for him to leave the world scene?

Well, Saddam was a so-so educated megalomaniac who pictured himself as the savior of the Arab world.

The Arab world at this point in its history is nearing its nadir. Gone are the fabulous centers of learning of 700 to 1,000 years ago. Gone are the great thinkers of philosophy, mathematics and natural science. In its place, like a society caught in a time warp, is cluster of nations that have fallen behind socially and economically, surpassed by the civilization that grew out of the Hellenic traditions and blossomed forth across Europe. It was the Europeans who would undergo a Renaissance and a religious Reformation and a philosophical period of Enlightenment that would develop into the Industrial Revolution that literally that would change the world and man's relationship to it.

To the Arab world, to see all this progress and not participate in it, much less be its leader, is and was a crushing humiliation. And in the Arab culture, as with most of the non-Occidental societies, humiliation is the worst that can happen to an individual, a village, a tribe, or a nation.

So, here we have a megalomaniac, who embodies the Arab feeling of humiliation, with delusions of grandeur that under his aegis he will be the new Saladin to rule the known world, or at least the Middle East. (Granted that Saladin was a Kurd, but he was the Islamic leader that most modern Middle Eastern Islamic leaders want to emulate his was the time of the great libraries and the great intellectuals and philosophers). His country also has the technical capability to create weapons of mass destruction. He already has developed and actually used various chemical weapons. He has been playing around with various biological weapons but probably is a tad short of the research needed to weaponize it. And then there were the nuclear weapons. Back in 1990 he got awfully

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