Originally posted by Incidents Happen
The whole "Terrorists killing terrorists" idea, and the "Who is good? who is evil?" idea, really sparked my imagination. After all, aren't we the ones who gave Saddamm Hussein the WMDs that they can't find? And aren't we the ones that gave Osama Bin Laden the SCUD missiles to use against the communists?

I still don't really understand why we went into Iraq. After all the 14 pages of posts, to me there was still no real evidence of a needed war. If someone could say "We went to war with Iraq to....." and answer that, I'd greatly appreciate it, because this American thinks that the war was pointless.

~Incidents

You're missing a lot of details.

1). The US did give a lot of military aide to Iraq durring the Iran/Iraq war, including some biological and chemical agents that Saddam used as the basis for his weapons research. But so did a lot of other countries including Russia, France and Germany. In a lot of respects, US aide to Iraq was minor in comparison, and stopped at the end of the Iran/Iraq War. Russian and French (extra especially Russian) weapons sales to Iraq never really stopped almost until we invaded.

2). Osama bin Laden never had access to SCUD missles. Infact, the SCUD missle is a Soviet (Communist) Russian system. I don't think he'd even want SCUD missles as they require large launcher trucks and a lot of infrastructure to support. bin Laden is interested in small, portable systems that can be more easily hidden. We did though give training to bin Laden when he was fighting the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, well before his anti-US feelings ever surfaced.