Every GOP candidate is being asked, or as I prefer to call it, interrogated with, “Knowing what we know now, would you have gone into Iraq?” Of course, Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton isn’t asked this question although she voted to go to Iraq while using very strong rhetoric while the voting was taking place. That is a different story, however; it concerns the corrupt American media in this 21st century. If I were one of these GOP candidates, and thank God I am not (my skeletons in the closet still have the flesh on them), I would tell these gotcha reporters, “Damn right, I would have gone to Iraq — and probably sooner.” The WMDs were a small part of the reasoning for the taking down of Saddam. And what follows is the reasoning for why I would have gone to Iraq and a bit of exposure to those hypocritical Democrats who were for the war before they were against it.

A bit of history on the former and now dead dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. Saddam grew up in northern Iraq with his mother and stepfather. The step father was an extremely cruel man, so, along with abusing Saddam, he taught the young man the “art” of cruelty. Saddam tortured animals on a regular basis in his childhood and in his teen years, and graduated to human murders. He committed the first of tens of thousands of murders when he was about 14 by murdering a herder in his neighborhood. In 1955, he joined the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party. From that point, Saddam started his political career. The Ba'ath Party was organized during the 1930s by two middle class teachers. The foundation of this political party was inspired by Germany’s National Socialist Party (the NAZIs). And for the next few years, the Ba'athists and other Arab nationalist organizations were allied with the NAZIs, including the Mufti of Jerusalem who spent most of WWII in Germany and is rumored to have been in the meeting where the Final Solution was implemented. After the war, Saddam rose through the Ba'ath Party by shrewd political moves and assassinations. In 1979, Saddam became the dictator of Iraq. He swiftly had all political rivals put to death and outlawed all political parties. His style of rule was based entirely on his two greatest heroes of the 20th Century, Hitler and Stalin. He studied these two monsters extensively and patterned his own life after theirs.

Saddam spent nearly all his time as dictator, spreading violence and terror throughout the world. Most of this is well known, and, after the release of nearly 50 thousand captured documents in 2005, his direct involvement in world terrorism was even deeper than previously known. In the 1980s, he financed and supported many, many terrorist attacks on civilians all over the world; many of these were against American citizens. In fact, Saddam was behind and, afterward, gave protection to many in the Abu Nidal group including Nidal himself. This terrorist organization was responsible for the Achille Lauro hijacking where a wheelchair-bound American businessman was murdered. Saddam lost some power worldwide when he miscalculated the world reaction to his invasion of Kuwait in 1991. But that also caused him to increase his secret terror training. This secret training took place in primarily three camps — Samarra, Ramadi and Salman Pak — and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interrogations by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence.

The worst of Saddam’s atrocities against Americans was in April 1995. Tim McVeigh and an unknown man left a truck full of explosive material in front of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 Americans. Of course, the prevailing narrative is this was carried out by “right-wing” radicals. This story is a lie. In fact, the operation was planned and organized by Tim McVeigh and Terry Nicholes with financing, training and support of suspected Iraqi secret services. The case is still open to this day. The investigation is documented very well in Jayna Davis’ book, “The Third Terrorist.” No one in Oklahoma City believes the nonsensical government story. McVeigh spent his last years on death row writing of his admiration for the Iraqi Republican Guard, Saddam and the Ba'ath Party system of governing. It is well known and documented that Terry Nicholes flew back and forth to Manila more than 50 times in the years leading up to 1995. Pretty good trick for a farmer on welfare. Not to mention his meeting with Ramzi Yousef, one of the planners of the 1992 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Coming home from Vietnam in 1971 and the ensuing decade, I heard and read over and over what a waste of time, money and blood myself and the thousands of other soldiers sacrificed during that war. This was probably one of the hardest thing I had to deal with — including the war itself. Everything I did and everything I saw overseas was a useless waste of time and money, hence the reason for seldom speaking of it during the 1970s. In fact, I often felt embarrassed for being drafted and serving because of the apathy and sometimes open disgust from media and even some people I ran into over the years. I know the extent of the hostility towards soldiers in the current era is nothing compared to 45+ years ago, but damage can still be done to these returning soldiers. They spent day after day on hyper alert, watching every movement and suspecting every person they met as someone wanting to kill them. They watched as friends were hurt and sometimes killed. They sweated, they cried, they laughed and they fought for each other. They sacrificed nearly everything close to them. And now they are told, “By the way, what you did was a waste of time; but hey, good job anyway.” Sorry, but that just doesn’t cut it….

What really happened was, because of their sacrifice, we did have the only country in the Arab/Muslim world with a form of democracy, the second in the Middle East next to Israel. They removed who was probably one of the most dangerous dictators on the planet. They provided freedom for more than 30 million people. Not to mention the spread of American influence throughout the rest of the Middle East. There were problems and there were going to be those who will fight this freedom with everything they had. Radical Islamists tried their best to fill vacuums left with the downfall of some of the Arab strongmen. Of course, the one place in the Arab world where radical Islam would have had more difficulty taking hold was Iraq. And this is because of the work our people did there for 10 years. This was all for naught with the Obama administration and its rush to leave Iraq. The “Arab Spring” was started by Arabs who were wanting what the rest of the first world had. The strongest movement and the most important was the street uprisings in the Iran, just prior to us leaving Iraq. This one was ignored by Obama, of course. And those vacuums open in other countries — Libya, Syria, the Palestinian territories and even Egypt, to an extent — were filled with radicals who were inspired by the worst of the Islamic text and the Ba'athists type politics; i.e., NAZIs. With the civil war in Syria spilling over into Iraq, we should have, and could have easily, left a contingent of ground troops and air power to support the Iraqis. If only a division were left in Iraq after the stand down, ISIS would have found it nearly impossible to get far into Iraqi territory and we wouldn’t be seeing children raped and enslaved, Christians being beheaded and soldiers being burned alive. I have heard it said that Saddam would have stopped the ISIS fighters. Utter B.S. ISIS officers and trainers are former officers in Saddam’s Ba'ath party Republican Guard. These Ba'athists are those who are doing these atrocities.

For decades, Saddam was directly responsible for the death of hundreds of Americans, and that fact alone was probably the most important case for taking out his regime. Saddam was directly responsible for the murder of thousands of citizens from our allied countries. Saddam financed, trained and supported terrorist activities worldwide for three decades. He had broken 17 UN treatises, each one with the threat for military action. He had thrown out all the inspectors a couple of times. His regime throughout the 1990s mass murdered tens of thousands of Iraqis, leaving hundreds of mass graves with grinning skulls all over the desert. I know from a personal story of a massive terrorist camp, Ansar al-Islam in Northern Iraq, bombed by U.S. jets in May 2003. Bodies of terrorists in civilian clothes lied right alongside the bodies of Iraqi soldiers from Saddam’s Republican Guard and brand new artillery weapons from Iran.  All proof positive of Saddam’s direct involvement in terror. The UN banned rockets or Scuds. Saddam could have these for defense as long as they flew no further than 90 K (about 60 miles). U.S. soldiers found dozens of Scuds, the newer North Korean type that would easily fly 600 to 1000 miles. I have seen photos of these.

Weapons of mass destruction? Saddam still had plenty of these banned weapons according to WikiLeaks’ newly released Iraq war documents (the part of the WikiLeaks documents the MSM ignored). U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction. Not to mention the book by General Georges Hormiz Sada , "Saddam’s Secrets,“ a gripping and believable story of the months leading up to the invasion and how tons of material was spirited out of Iraq into Syria.

Given all these facts, the lack of massive numbers of WMDs are a small portion of the reasoning behind taking down one of the few 20th century international monsters. And I will always support taking out these sorts of dregs on humanity.