How Jeb Bush blundered into making the Iraq War his problem

But for a moment, let’s just think through the different hypotheticals and consider what an honest answer would have looked like. We don’t really know if the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. And we certainly know that we would have been better off if we hadn’t launched a war to remove his government.

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If Hussein really was the madman the last Bush administration claimed him to be, sure, we could absolve ourselves. If Hussein was a key player in the 9/11 plot, if he was rapidly developing weapons of mass destruction that could deliver a mushroom cloud on United States soil, if he regularly made use of a human shredder machine for sport, absolutely, the world would be better off without him.

These were lies. Hussein was just another awful Middle Eastern autocrat, a man whose state was gelded by a no-fly-zone, a dictator with an expansive taste in ’80s tween erotica. But he was also a holdover of Baathist pan-Arabism, serving as a counterweight to Iran’s regional ambitions and an obstacle to Sunni radicalism. So, no, we don’t know that the whole world is actually better off without him.

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