Why did the United States go to war against Iraq in 2003?

The decision was controversial at the time and remained so today, but the reason was clear.

Saddam Hussein, the brutal dictator of Iraq for 35 years, was the central threat to peace in the Middle East.

With that threat removed, the Bush administration believed the establishment of a functioning democracy in Iraq

would encourage the growth of democracy elsewhere in the Arab world.

As democracy spread, terrorism would retreat.

But it is on the bloodstained life and career of Saddam Hussein that we need to concentrate in order better to understand why the United States felt forced to act in 2003.

We begin with the Iran-Iraq War, which Saddam started in 1980 and which lasted until 1988.

One million people died in the course of the decade-long struggle.

And during that war, weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, especially poison gas, were used on a regular basis by both sides.

Once his war with Iran ended, instead of building up his shattered nation, Saddam decided to embark on another lunatic adventure.

In 1990, he tried to grab 19% of the world's oil supply by invading Q8.

His brief annexation of Q8 proved to be another disaster.

The mother of all battles, as Saddam called it, turned out to be a three-week route. His Iraqi army utterly defeated by a US-led coalition.

But rather than trying Saddam as a war criminal, America and the West allowed him to stay in power.

This appeasement eventually led Saddam, once again, to draw entirely the wrong conclusion and to his making yet another colossal mistake.

He arrogantly believed that his Iraqi army might actually defeat the United States in a second encounter.

His trump card, he believed, or at least attempted to make the world believe, was his possession of WMD, large quantities of poison gas and, if only in his imagination,

a rapidly progressing nuclear weapons development program.

There was no reason to doubt that he had WMD, as he'd used poison gas in his war against Iran.

No one, not the Germans, not the Russians, not the British, had any doubts about this.

Looking back at the 12 years between the Gulf War and the Iraq War, Saddam might have been able to reestablish international credibility by complying with the 16 reasonable UN resolutions passed between November 1990 and December 1999.

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