Parallels to Iraq

Critics and opponents of the Iraq War will either claim that America (1) went to war over there under false pretenses, or (2) had no valid purpose for being there in the first place. They argue that because no link was found between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda—the principal architect of the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—and no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) recovered, we should never have been there to begin with.
I beg to differ.
First of all, to say that American forces were committed to a war under false pretenses is, in and of itself, a falsehood. The President of the United States and the Congress each reviewed the same intelligence that strongly suggested Saddam Hussein was an indirect supporter of al-Qaeda’s terrorist efforts, and the former Iraqi dictator was hiding WMDs. Both the executive and legislative branches voted for a resolution to invade Iraq and oust Hussein’s tyrannical Baath Party government from power.
Unfortunately, neither an al-Qaeda link nor WMDs could be established. But it would be a gross misstatement to say America went to war under false pretenses. There was nothing pretentious about the intelligence that both the White House and Capitol Hill relied upon to make the decision to go to war. It may have proved incorrect, but that doesn’t mean a war against a brutal dictator was somehow made invalid.
Under what pretenses, pray tell, did the United States, under the protection of NATO, invade Serbia, other than to oust another brutal dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, from power? That was all the reason America required then, and should have been all it needed to invade Iraq.
Nobody on the left criticized former President Bill Clinton for the decision to take the lead of NATO forces and drive the butcher Milosevic from power. But when George W. Bush led the effort to invade Iraq, the cries against the action were loud and numerous.
Why?
Was Saddam Hussein any better than Milosevic? Was the latter somehow more deserving of military justice than the former?
Let’s look at what the two dictators had in common: Both were butchers, who murdered people en masse, by the thousands. Both were greedy, power-hungry narcissists and blood-thirsty sadists who could never kill or torture enough to quench their violent appetites. Both were enemies of democracy and the virtues of liberty, equality and justice that go along with it. And both hated the United States of America.
The war in Serbia wasn’t any more or less virtuous than the Iraq War. But because a liberal democrat presided over the former, and a neo-conservative republican over the latter, somehow we are supposed to believe that one was good and the other bad?
Sorry, I don’t buy it.
Furthermore, where are all the protests against Iraq now that Bush is out of office and the liberals once again have one of their own in the White House? I’ve heard nothing but crickets singing on the issue of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since January 20, 2009.
I wonder why that is?