I’ve said this several times before, and I still suspect that the reason Bush bought into the “no-WMD” story so early and stuck to it was simple: it was more important to discourage Al Queda from sending teams out into desert depots looking for them.
Remember that the Bush admin didn’t just buy-in to that story, they *sold* it earnestly from the very beginning. There were even a few stories of WMD stocks being found in the initial invasion but these stories were squelched and denied immediately.
It’s also possible that there are still ongoing searches happening in some locations around Iraq. I recall Iraq being described not as having many ammo depots, but basically the whole country *being* an ammo depot with literally tens of thousands of locations to examine. It could take years to fully check out the whole place. And yet... the story was sold right after the invasion that there was nothing to be found. How could they have known this? They couldn’t. But it wasn’t worth the risk that there might be something out there to be found and having lots of bad guys out there trying to get ahead of you.
Just a thought.
Add to this that there was that interesting little raid by “Israelis” deep into Syria’s Bekaa Valley a while back that incinerated lots of stuff... and Syria was amazingly quiet about the whole affair. A nuclear plant? Really? Anything else there perhaps that the Syrians didn’t want known to have been there? And maybe if we’d shut up they would too? Another thought.
Genius. Of course that is what happened.
And Bush must have known that he would be looked on as a dunce and a murderer, to take it all onto his shoulders, in order to protect the American troops in harm’s way, as well as any targeted place in our or the other western countries that Al Qaida would have chosen.
This makes perfect sense. I may not agree with Bush on everything, but that was some serious courage. Not too many other Presidents would have had the b*lls.