Saddam tapes affirm that invasion was justified ... in 1995!

With the defection of Hussein's son-in-law and the revelation that Iraq was deceiving the world and maintaining its WMD and WMD programs and the knowledge that Iraq was providing safe haven for one of the vermin involved in the 1993 WTC bombing -- to say nothing of the plan to assassinate GHWB -- "shock and awe" should have been unleashed on Baghdad in 1995/1996.

Of course, this was at a time when presidential approval poll points trumped leadership. Teenaged boys have a tough time with disapproval. Soldiers have next of kin; cruise missiles do not.

Adolescents make poor Commanders in Chief.

ISG top guy Charles Duelfer, reacting to the tapes, repeated his MSM-ignored 2004 conclusion ...

...

Charles Duelfer, who led the official U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction after the war, says the tapes show extensive deception but don't prove that weapons were still hidden in Iraq at the time of the U.S.-led war in 2003. "What they do is support the conclusion in the report, which we made in the last couple of years, that the regime had the intention of building and rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, when circumstances permitted." (Emphasis ours)

...

-more-

To us, Duelfer's 2004 conclusion -- which we actually bothered to READ in 2004 -- was match point.

Ignore that that which once existed ceased to exist with no proof of its destruction (required by the 1991 armistice) and that evidence suggests that the stuff that once existed might have been moved elsewhere: Saddam obviously intended to make more at his earliest possible convenience.

Wether you're killed by bio or chem weapons this week or two years from this week ... you're still dead.

Why this conclusion has been mostly quashed by the MSM and only tepidly pointed out by the Administration is baffling. Actually, the MSM part isn't so baffling.

In a sane world, it'd be incumbent upon Saddam's defenders to explain why allowing his regime to survive was sensible policy.