Just the Facts (Counter Trey's Inaugural Post)

There have been so many disagreements between the left and right about the war in Iraq that I thought I would list some items that both sides should find indisputable:

1. Militant Muslims are responsible for flying fuel-laden jets into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, which killed thousands of innocent civilians
2. The leader of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was a militant Muslim and an Iraqi who escaped capture in the US and received refuge in Iraq
3. Militant Muslims can be found among different races, countries, and ethnicities; they exist on nearly every continent
4. Despite their diversity, militant Muslims have at least one thing in common: They hate the United States of America and they would like to harm its people
5. Iraq was a militarized country and is populated by Muslims
6. The former leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was a Muslim who invaded Kuwait, entered into a war with Iran, developed and used weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and refused to comply with the UN's demands to leave Kuwait, which led to Iraq's first war with the US; all of which makes him a militant Muslim
7. Osama bin Laden is a militant Muslim, who among other things, trained suicide bombers to attack westerners
8. Saddam Hussein offered $25,000 to every family of a suicide bomber that killed an Israeli in an attack
9. Iraq had terrorist training camps within its borders
10. Zarqawi is an al Qaeda trained terrorist who sought medical attention in Iraq years before the US invasion in 2003
11. Saddam Hussein used WMDs against the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War and against his country's Kurds and Shia in times of peace, which killed tens of thousands of people
12. Tariq Aziz, Hussein’s right-hand man, believed that Hussein possessed WMDs as late as March 2003
13. The UN Security Council passed twelve (that’s TWELVE) resolutions culminating in Resolution 1441 that demanded Iraq disarm itself of WMDs and ballistic missiles and allow UN inspectors to verify the disarmament
14. On march 10, 2003, France—a permanent member of the UN Security Council—declared it would veto any attempt by the Council to create a another resolution that could lead to war, which forced the US and Britain to enforce 1441 without the UN's blessing
15. France received billions of dollars of illegal payments from Hussein that were manipulated from the UN's Oil-for-Food program
16. George W. Bush gave Hussein a firm deadline—March 17, 2003—to comply with Resolution 1441 or suffer war
17. Hussein did not make an attempt to comply with Resolution 1441 and convince the free world that he had destroyed his stockpiles of WMDs

These are all pretty well documented facts that can be found in mainstream publications and broadcasts (so they must be true). I do not expect an argument over the substance of these statements. Each statement, on its own, is not as important as the picture it creates when combined with the others. It is a mosaic.

Only the most deluded of liberals could agree that these statements are true and deny that there is a connection between 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq. One delusion has it that bin Laden would never cooperate with someone like Hussein because Hussein is an atheist. That argument would be laughable if it were not so terrifying that many influential, western liberals actually believe it. Terrorists, like whores, rarely care with whom they sleep.

It is because of the atrocities of 9/11 that we are fighting a war against militant Muslims who resort to terrorism. Saddam Hussein is a militant Muslim who created a state that sponsored terorism. Why is there disagreement?