If you live in a house infested by rats, you may think it's okay to tolerate them for a while. They're just a 'nuisance,' as John Kerry might say. You might, if you're Bill Clinton, tolerate a series of 'minor' rat attacks. But when one of your children dies from a bite, you do everything you can to kill the rats and plug up all the rat holes to protect your family. You don't care which specific rat was responsible for the death. You simply do everything necessary to make sure nothing like that ever happens again. Post-9/11, George Bush faced a world with a lot of rat holes. The most obvious, urgent, and 'doable' rat hole was in Baghdad.
Those who opposed the war insisted there was no link between Saddam and 9/11. There probably wasn't in the sense they meant. But there was an ironclad link in the minds of many of us. In the world ushered in by 9/11, in a world where threats need to be taken seriously and terrorism cannot be seen as a mere nuisance, letting Saddam Hussein -- the only world leader to praise the 9/11 attacks -- stay in Baghdad simply made no sense.
Read on....
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