A plague 'o both your houses

One of the things that has always bothered me about the debate regarding Iraq for the last 15 years has been the bipolar fashion in which it has existed. It's either you support the U.S. or you support Saddam Hussein.

A story in today's Times (London) reminds me of why I always rejected this binary approach. "A British cow that died in an Oxfordshire field in 1937 has emerged as the source of Saddam Hussain's 'weapons of mass destruction' programme that led to the Iraq war." The ear of this cow was sent to an English lab and then a culture of the anthrax that killed the cow was sent to the United States where it was then sold to Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s while he was still our ally fighting a war with Iran. Indeed, a congressional investigation even found the invoices of the sale.

Saddam Hussein was an evil guy in the 1980s when we sold him the anthrax. When Donald Rumsfeld was shaking hands with him. When we expected him him to be moral in the 1990s while he and us starved his people and withheld the medication doctors needed to treat the cancers caused by our depleted uranium bombs.

Both of us are to blame for the disaster that is Iraq today. Not one or the other. Both.

Lord have mercy.