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gpsman: "He obviously had possessed WMDs, and was willing to use them."
No duh. That would be because the U.S. sold them to him, or gave him the money to buy them. Where do you think Saddam Hussein got the helicopters he used to drop ricin (I believe) on Kurds? Uncle Sam. What was the U.S.'s response? A slap on the wrist. This would be back in Reagan's and Bush Sr.'s days.
gpsman: "Whether he still had them, I think, was and remains a moot point."
It's not a moot point if it was the primary justification for a war, invasion and occupation. Most of the chemical agents Saddam Hussein had were procured in the late 1980s and would have been past their usage point (due to deterioration) by the mid 1990s. But who cares, right?
gpsman: "Without assurance of their destruction he could reasonably be assumed to still possess them and pose a serious risk to the region and the world."
See above. The shelf-life of his known chemical agents was well-known, and was considered by experts to be non-weaponizable. Even the Bush administration didn't use that as a justification. Instead, they tried to claim Hussein was attempting to obtain new materials.
Then there's Britian's "dodgy dossier." (Look it up.) They helped us with our deceptive marketing scheme. Anybody who does their homework cannot conclude anything other than that there was a concerted effort to mislead the public. Paul Wolfowitz admitted as much in his June 2003 interview in Vanity Fair. (Look it up.)
gpsman: "I hold Clinton responsible for not smoking his ass long before Cheney and Rumsfeld et al. got the chance to use W as their dummy."
B-b-b-b-but Clinton! It's always about blaming Clinton, isn't it? "Smoking his ass," huh? How exactly? Clinton did bomb Baghdad in response to an early-stages plan to assassinate Bush Sr. Then he set up a rigorous containment plan, which cost U.S. taxpayers maybe $4 billion per year, during which time Saddam stewed in his juices manipulating the oil-for-food program like a standard-issue mafia don. I don't know about you, but $4 billion a year is much better than $4 billion every week or two. The oil-for-food program could have been cleaned up, the CIA could have staged a coup or some other guerilla assassination or whatever, and it would have sucked but it wouldn't have sucked the entire U.S. economy down a bottomless drain.
