this got me thinking... (about the Iraq war)

If you're not interested in talking about the Iraq war, just ignore this; otherwise, follow along, please...

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense of the United States, said before the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 9, 2003:

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of WMD; we acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light — through the prism of our experience on 9/11."
(From http://www.usiraqprocon.org/)

This quote tells me a couple of things. First, apparently it wasn't Saddam himself that was ultimately the main reason for the decision to go to war with Iraq, it was the 9/11 attacks. Second, if this is in fact the main reason for the Iraq war, then what should concern us the most (in critiquing the decision to go to war) is not whether Saddam had WMD, or even whether he was an evil dictator, but whether or not he was connected to 9/11.

Since the connection between Saddam and Al Queda has been shown to be all but nonexistent, according to most of the evidence found since the war started (and some from before it began), it seems reasonable to say that the Iraq war was a mistake, because the actual aims of the war were misguided, according to the administrations own claims. Does this make sense?

Now, of course, Saddam had links to terrorists, but then, so do most countries in the world. The question is, did he have substantial links to the people who attacked us? The answer to that seems to be 'no'. So was it just bad intelligence that got us into this war, or something else? I don't want conspiracy theories, I'm just trying to figure out how/why this whole mess got started. Am I missing something?

I am aware that, given our presence in Iraq, it almost doesn't matter how it started, we have to clean up the mess we started, and hopefully that will happen. I just hope people don't think that just because we may end up stabilizing the region, that the war was justified, because if we are going by what the administration had as their "evidence", the war was a mistake from the start.

Ok, that's all... as you were.