Bush was right to go to war with Iraq

I was an artillery lieutenant watching Iraqi vehicles in front of us escape north the last night of Desert Storm. We had just been ordered to stop engaging; I felt then we should have gone to Baghdad in 1991, and if we didn't we would be back. Within two weeks Saddam gassed the Kurds. Today Tony Blair so correctly reminds his critics, Saddam Hussein might have had a bomb by the end of the last decade if we did not remove him.

After 9/11 we could not sit by and watch Hans Blix play cat and mouse with the Iraqis who shifted, hid and moved to neighboring countries the bits and pieces of various WMD programs. Bush acted decisively against Hussein's blocking of inspectors to check sites a violation of the U.N. resolutions. War was justified when the U.N. would not enforce the resolutions.

There is no denying Hussein had WMD programs in varying degrees of operation. I was again in Iraq in 2008; the Stars and Stripes reported yellow cake being gathered and hauled away. This stuff was used to make mustard gas which Hussein used on the Kurds as late as 2002.

The correctness of Bush's decision was not so much in the prospects of finding a large cache or facility; it was ending what prospects Hussein had to make even small WMD. Iraq has been costly. Costlier still might have been the result if the U.S. had done nothing, while waiting for Hans Blix to get past armed guards with a clipboard. Imagine if by the end of the last decade Hussein built a weapon and handed it off to a terrorist group for use against an American city. Then we would say: Why didn't Bush invade before it was too late? We had evidence.

Harold Knudsen

Arlington Heights