The standard knee-jerk response from some has been: "but don't forget that we created/put him there in the first place.

Even if it was true, by what cruel tortuous chain of logic could this be seen to justify not liberating Iraq from this monstrous tyrant??

Let's look at some facts:

In the period 1980-1990 Iraq imported .9bn worth of weapons.

Of this, France supplied 19%.

The USSR, East Germany and Czechoslovakia supplied 57%, China 8%. The US does not appear in the list of other countries which supplied more than 2%.

Not only did France supply weapons, Chirac also allowed the construction of nuclear reactors in Iraq, supplied fissile material and trained over 600 Iraqi nuclear scientists.