Rep. Tom Cotton: Iraq 'was a just and noble war'

A Republican congressman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan on Sunday looked back at the Iraq war and declared that it was a "just and noble war."

During an interview on CNN, host Candy Crowley asked Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR) for his views on the war 10 years after the U.S. invaded.

"The Iraq war noble and just war," the Arkansas Republican declared. "I would say it was worth it, but it's also a little too soon to tell because there's nothing ever certain in human affairs."

"But if you look at the accomplishments of our troops in Iraq, they deposed an evil tyrant who was an aggressive international dictator," Cotton continued. "He'd invaded across two boundaries. He had demonstrated the ability and the will to use weapons of mass destruction. He was believed by every Western government -- including senior high-ranking officials in President Obama's cabinet right now -- to be developing new weapons, who was in violation of numerous United Nations resolutions."

"But under those conditions, I think as I said, it was a just and noble war."

Many in Congress, however, now look back at the Iraq war as a mistake because President George W. Bush's administration used false information about weapons of mass destruction as a "pretext" to invade.

"You remember World War II, Korea, all the major wars of this nation," Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said recently. "This is one that slips into the background, and people are comfortable with it slipping into the background. I think the legacy of this is always going to be that it was a mistake, that it was pre-emptive, that it wasn't based on real information, and that the whole struggle could have been handled differently."

Watch this video from CNN's State of the Union, broadcast March 17, 2013.