The relatively quick fall of Baghdad shows that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a "paper tiger" rather than a major threat to world peace, Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said Thursday.
"What we were told and what you saw in the press last fall and earlier this year is that he had a massive war machine," said Harkin, the most outspoken critic of the war in Iraq among members of the Iowa congressional delegation.
"It looks now like this was just a Third World country - there were people fighting with tennis shoes on, on the Iraqi side," Harkin told reporters. "I don't know what else we're going to find, but they didn't fly even one airplane in the air. They had almost nothing.
"So if they were that weak, where we could just roll over them like that, tell me again how he was such a big threat in the past?" the senator added.
The original argument for not fighting them was that we would suffer too many casualties. Harkin can't suffer our successes. No one ever accused Saddam of having a great military. He doesn’t need one. Osama Bin Laden didn’t need a military to accomplish 911.
If Saddam did nothing but fund suicide bombers in Israel our move was justified. But the amount of chemical warfare suits being found along the way, and the disappearance of employees of CNN in Baghdad, does anyone think it wasn’t worth the effort? Saddam Hussein aspired to greater things than what he accomplished. I’m glad we didn’t wait around to find out what they were.
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