The late former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, after his capture in 2003. (AP File photo)

If this doesn't prove the Iraq war was wrong...

Recently, the National Security Archive and the New York Daily News released reports of declassified FBI interviews of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein after his December 2003 capture in Tikrit following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq earlier that year. In the interview, Saddam told FBI interviewers, who were speaking with him in Arabic, that he led the world to believe he still had weapons of mass destruction so that Iran wouldn't think his country was weak.

For 12 years after the first Gulf War in 1991 (a.k.a. Operation Desert Storm), UN inspectors have tried to root out all or any of Saddam's WMDs, but to no avail. Each time the inspectors met resistance, the UN Security Council passed a resolution to order Saddam to reveal the WMDs or else. When he refused, the U.S. military launched air strikes on suspected chemical- or biological-weapon sites, but sometimes ended up to be civilian factories.

And then 9/11 came. The administration of George W. Bush tried to figure out who launched the attack, where four jumbo jets were used as missiles against the World Trade Center and sites within Washington, D.C. The two jets targetting New York found their spots, eventually toppling the Twin Towers. A third slammed into the Pentagon. A fourth may have been heading toward the Capitol building or the White House, but United Flight 93's passengers rebelled against the hijackers and forced it down in a Pennsylvania field.

When it became clear the WMDs were not where the Bush administration said they were, I had big doubts on the Iraq War by the time the 2004 Presidential Election rolled around. I felt Sen. Kerry would have led the country better than Bush, because he was a war hero during Vietnam, whereas Bush allegedly skipped out on his reserve duty. I'm not going to dwell on that election, but let's just say a new term was coined after this debackle: swiftboating.

Now, back to the day's news: The Bush administration persuaded the world that the rationale for invading Iraq in March 2003 was to expose Saddam's lies about WMDs. Well, it now seems he lied about having them, not that he didn't. Quoting the AP article, via Yahoo! News: "The documents also confirm previous reports that Saddam falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — the main U.S. rationale behind the war — because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, the hostile neighbor he considered a bigger threat than the U.S."

You see how this all gets centered around the old Iran-Iraq rivalry? The two nations had an eight-year war in the 1980s, and Saddam feared the theocratical regime in Tehran than he did presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton and the younger Bush. He basically played a high-stakes game of poker, and he was bluffing that he had a bunch of aces in the hole, what some of us poker players call "the weapons of mass destruction." He really had a 7-2 off-suit.

Here's another quote from the FBI report through the AP article about the rationale for invading Iraq: "Saddam also stated that the United States used the Sept. 11 terrorist attack as a justification to attack Iraq and said the U.S. had 'lost sight of the cause of 9/11.' He claimed that he denounced the attack in a series of editorials." The cause, according to Saddam: al Qaeda.

Another assertation of the Bush Administration to invade Iraq was because the Iraqi government was in liege with al Qaeda. Saddam said in the FBI interview that he never met the group's leader, Osama bin Laden, and called him a "zealot." The government also never cooperated with al Qaeda.

So there you go, right there in black and white, the rationalles for the Iraq War blown right out of the water. We spent six years going after shadows in Iraq when the real War on Terror front was in Afghanistan. We helped liberate that country in 2002 of the Taliban and al Qaeda, but then took the eyes off the prize when we supposedly have bin Laden cornered somewhere on teh Afghan-Pakistani border.

Now, because of this fool's errand, the Taliban has refortified, taken back several areas of Afghanistan and has worked its way into a few sections of Pakistan. With them, they still harbor al Qaeda and bin Laden.

A friend of mine, Silly Billy, disputes the existence of al Qaeda and bin Laden. He practices Islam, though I don't know of which style, but he does allow his wife Aurora to dress up in fetish outfits (i.e. zentai, latex, bondage, etc.), so he's not a fundamentalist. Still, he told me when we were talking on ICQ a few weeks back that al Qaeda is a myth and bin Laden, a fairy tale. I'd like to tell him that if a fellow Muslim acknowledges bin Laden and al Qaeda exist, then it must be so.

Why don't we invade Iran, too?

Over the weekend, the government of Iran announced that current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won re-election over three challengers, the closest being former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. However, supporters of the pro-reformist candidate, as well as many from the rest of the world, are crying foul and fraud.

The main issue with the election result was announced within an hour or two after the polls closed rather than days or weeks later with the usual paper ballots. There also were no outside election monitors from the international community watching to make sure the Ahmadinejad government isn't pressuring the electorate to vote for him when they don't want to.

The result of the announced result? Mousavi's supporters started marching the streets calling for a reversal of the election, or at least an investigation of the vote. It seems Iran's supreme ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has listened to the people. He's ordered an investigation on the vote. Of course, the international community is calling for an outside entity to investigate.

The point is here that Iran's rulers may have fixed the election so that their favored candidate, Ahmadinejad, continues to be the figurehead to the rest of the world. Ahmadinejad has been calling for the elimination of Israel, ambitious in getting nuclear weapons, though the Iranians say the nuclear ambitions are for peaceful (i.e. electricity) means, and has been threatening the rest of the world.

Seven years ago, we invaded Afghanistan, Iran's eastern neighbor, to hunt down Osama bin Laden and get an oppressive regime, the Taliban, out of power so that bin Laden's network, al Qaeda, doesn't have a safe haven there. We were initially successful, but the Taliban is strengthening both there and in Pakistan. Two years later, we invated Iraq, Iran's western neighbor and long-time enemy, because its oppressive leader, Saddam Hussein, was 1) an ally of al Qaeda (which he wasn't), 2) obtaining nuclear weapons (he wasn't) and/or 3) still had weapons of mass destruction and was hiding them from UN inspectors (he didn't).

Now that we have a different president, the U.S. has been trying to get into talks with Ahmadinejad and Khamenei about ending the nuclear ambitions of Iran, as well as eliminating its state sponsorship of terrorist groups like Hamas. It seems that Iran has slapped that hand away by fixing this election. Reports were that Mousavi was wanting to better Iran's ties to the West, which has been almost non-existent since the 1979 Islamic Revolution 30 years ago. Of course, that was highlighted by Iranian university students capturing the U.S. embassy there and holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

President Obama has a tough choice now. Does he continue his quest to open relations with Iran's current regime, or does he do what he predecessor, former Pres. George W. Bush, did and invade Iran to get rid of the clerics that really rule the country? Or does he take a middle ground, help encourage a new revolution by Iranians who feel oppressed by the current system?

Whatever Washington, the rest of the world or the UN does for this issue, they'd better do it soon.