Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "Young People Have Been Misled About Everything | feat. @drpeterboghossian" video.
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@Zack Coggins "Americans cheered because the invasion was to stop terrorism."
And Saddam Hussein was a state sponsor of terrorism. We knew this before and found more proof of it when we invaded.
Documentary evidence:
(I have links for all this, but YT or PotLE isn't letting me post them)
Physical evidence:
(I have links for all this, but YT or PotLE isn't letting me post them)
including fuselage mock-up used to train hijackers
Human evidence, Saddam Husein's Iraq provided sanctuary for:
Abu Nidal - terrorist leader
Abu Abbas - Achille Lauro hijacker and murderer of wheelchair-bound US citizen Leon Klinghoffer, captured by US forces in Iraq in 2005
Abdul Rahman Yasin - wanted for his connection to the original WTC bombing.
Among other activites, the Iraqi dictator payed the families of Palestinian suicide bombers large rewards.
"you suggesting Iraq was complicit in the attacks on 9/11?"
No, Bush inaugurated a war on terror, not a war on 9/11.
" If were concerned about holding those involved in terror attacks on the US then we should have invaded Saudi."
What part of "state SPONSOR of terror" do you not understand? If we attacked every country where terrorists were RECRUITED, we would have to attack ourselves.
And while we're on the subject, the "Bush lied, people died" narrative is fully and diametrically false. There are two problems with this slander:
1. WMD's were not the main reason cited for the Iraq war by the administration. Saddam's Iraq being a state sponsor of terror was; as was amply proved before and after the war.
2. The much maligned "16 words" in a several hour state of the union address,"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa", supposedly the justification for the "Bush lied, people died" narrative, WERE NOT, in fact, A LIE.
a. The MSM's only source cited for the accusation was an article published by the nobody husband of Valerie Plame who claimed that he had talked to government officials of Niger who denied the contact. In other words, the MSM was taking the word of a nobody over that of British Intelligence. (Which nobody himself lied, by suppressing the word of those Niger officials who confirmed the contact.)
(By the way, a word on the accusation that the Bush Administration outed a CIA agent's name, the aforementioned Valerie Plame, as punishment for her contradiction of the administration line is bogus from both ends. It is a matter of public knowledge that a journalist revealed her name, not the administration, and she wasn't even an agent, so her identity was not a secret. She was an analyst working a desk job in CIA headquarters, and her name was on the directory on the wall at the reception desk, in full public view.)
There was never a credible reason to doubt that Hussein did seek the material.
b. British Intelligence always stood by the report.
c. The MSM's narrative was concocted when the yellowcake uranium was not immediately found after the initial invasion. It was found later and disposed of properly:
(I have links for all this, but YT or PotLE isn't letting me post them)
Bush's "nation building" ambitions in both Iraq and Afghanistan were misguided. The proper procedure for dealing with a state sponsor of terror should be:
1. Defeat the nation's military and co-belligerants.\
2. Shoot the national leaders and the terrorists.
3. Leave.
4. Repeat as necessary.
This plays to our national strengths. We excel at battle. We suck at occupation. We have far fewer casualties in the former, and doing the latter actually dulls the edge of our battle skills. I don't buy "You broke it, you own it." It is the people who permitted the bad guys to take over that broke the country. We can't reverse the consequences of global folly. We can readily disincentivise the export of such folly. Sooner or later people have to take responsibility for cleaning up their own countries.
About "war for oil". No evidence has been presented that oil had a disproportionate role in motivating our Middle East wars, and it has been noted that none of the oil stuck to our fingers. It must be added that if you mean "the free flow of oil at market prices without blackmail", then as far as it goes, that is a noble, even a selfless goal. Our major allies are also major competitors in the high tech goods sector, and many of them are more dependent on oil imports than we are. It may be in the geopolitical/military interest of world peace for the rest of the "first world" to prosper, it is arguably not in the US' narrow FINANCIAL interest.
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