You can't, in good faith, argue that Iraq was about WMD proliferation.
First, we didn't go to war with Pakistan or India to prevent them from getting nukes, despite the fact that the historical tension between those countries means that actual use of WMDs is terrifyingly likely.
Second, if people who have a history of using such weapons are inherently ill-suited to having them (a possible counter-argument for my first point, since Pakistan and India have never used them before), then why on earth did anyone let Bush's national security team (including Rumsfeld) so near the red button when they actively participated in Hussein's use of those weapons.
When you make an argument based on a point, and that point turns out to be invalid, the argument is weaker. That is what my point has to do with the original argument.
On one hand Rumsfeld et. al. implied / declared WMD were OK for Hussein to use on the Kurds, but later on removed him for allegedly hiding WMD.
Since DC made the argument that Hussein should have been removed because of his WMD use, you could make the same argument about the folks in the US govt who sponsored Hussein's original use of WMD against the Kurds.
> ...went into the thinking of the political leaders back then.
But if the things you cite don't make logical sense, then those things must not have been actual considerations, or those considerations were made in bad faith.
> But if the things you cite don't make logical sense, then those things must not have been actual considerations, or those considerations were made in bad faith.
First, what some people regard as logical in 2014 didn't necessarily appear to be logical to the relevant decisionmakers in early 2003. Again, hindsight is 20-20.
Second, watch out for the fallacy that there's only one acceptable ranking of values, and that anyone with a different ranking must be either stupid or evil.
I take no position here on the merits of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only that the level of self-righteous certitude among the people calling for C. Rice's head is faintly nauseating --- if unsurprising; I'm old enough to remember the similar certitude of some of the people who rioted against the Vietnam war.
(My dad used to describe people like that in (quasi) anapaestic tetrameter: "Often mistaken but never in doubt.")
