Most people at the time thought the invasion of Iraq was at least in part in response to 9/11...
It was odd after 9/11 that Iraq was invade because of apparently weapons of mass destruction..Didn't Blair say in Parliament that these weapons could be launched against the west.
Was iraq used as a spacegoat for 9/11. ?
Well I think the whole 'lying about WMD' was very 'with benefit of hindsight'. The intelligence was flawed IN THE END, and when we got in there it became apparent that Iraq did not have the capability that our intelligence services thought they did. Or at least, they were able to successfully hide the evidence of the capability in the desert or smuggle weapons over the border between the renewed requests of access for UN weapons inspectors and Saddam's agreement to co-operate.
However, even the UN weapons inspection found large quantities of chemical and biological weapons agents known to be in Iraq's possession in 1998 unaccounted for.
There is little doubt Saddam's regime were trying to develop these weapons, but it appeared their progress in doing so and of pay-load delivery systems to threaten the west was not advanced as our intelligence services feared.
Ultimately, in the context of immediate post-9/11, everyone was taken aback. It had not been thought that Islamic fundamentalist groups had the capability or inclination to launch co-ordinated large-scale attacks against western targets on that scale.
The fear was that here we had in Iraq, a pariah state right in the heart-lands of Al-Qaeda, who had refused access to UN weapons inspectors for years following the original gulf war and was known to have in its possession stock-piles of chemical and biological agents and the fear was that if the Saddam regime was continued to be tolerated, that their attempts at developing these weapons could lead to them falling into the hands of extremist groups.
My thing about the Iraq war,wasn't the war itself or the decision to topple Saddam, it was a failure to have a follow-up plan that led to stability in the region following a massive power-vacuum.
Also, once we were there the decision to pull the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 due to political pressure back home was disgusting and cowardly. We've basically left those nations in carnage and as a bigger breeding ground for terrorism and as a bigger threat to the west than they were before intervention.
It was a gutless and cowardly move and an insult to all the soldiers who lost their lives, as the road we'd been attempting to lead the countries down, towards democracy, peace and stability has just been torn up in a few short years following our withdrawal.