Despite evidence that Saddam and Iraqi intelligence had ties to l-Qaeda, The Left called Iraq a distraction. The truth is that Saddam had given safe haven to various Al-Qaeda operatives like Zarqawi. Iran and Syria as well have assisted Al-Qaeda. After 9/11 the US was justified in attacking any one of these 3 after Afghanistan. The invasion of Iraq was justified. The Wilsonian Democracy spreading nonsense that we tried to implement was what led to the mess that place became. China and France got the oil contracts, the US got nothing out of the war. The Christian population was cut in half and the US did nothing. In retrospect, I would have opposed the war since it became some Progressive project, not putting a boot around the neck of our enemies. However, the invasion of Iraq, actually led to the capture of Osama Bin Laden.

In 2004, about six weeks after the capture of Saddam Hussein, Kurdish police nabbed a high-ranking al-Qaida operative named Hassan Ghul in a town near the Iranian border. It wasn’t long before Ghul was telling CIA interrogators about one of the organization’s couriers, who used the nom-de-guerre of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

“Hassan Ghul was the linchpin” in finding and killing Osamabin Laden, a U.S. official told The Associated Press on Monday. Ghul told the United States that the Kuwaiti-born Pakistani now known to have been Sheikh Abu Ahmed, who was killed along with the terrorist chieftain he served on Monday by U.S. Navy SEALs, was a crucial figure within al-Qaida.

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Ghul may have been next-to-unknown to Americans, but not to Newsmax readers. As early as March 8, 2004, Newsmax featured a newswire story  noting that Ghul was found with “a strategic memo from Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the mysterious terror leader allegedly behind the bombings of Shiites in Iraq.” And that “Ghul also yielded intel on bin Laden’s position.”

Iraq was a mix bag. Militarily it was a success and it killed some of Al-Qaeda’s best fighters. However it proved that spreading Democracy in the Islamic world is a fool’s errand. If the invasion assisted us in getting information on where Bin Laden was, that is one aspect that should be considered a success.