Inside Politics: Uses of hindsight & Duelfer vs. Kennedy

The Washington Times ^ | 10/8/04 | Greg Pierce

[Pfesser]

Uses of hindsight
The new report from the Iraq Survey Group confirmed what most already had assumed — that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion, The Washington Post said yesterday in an editorial.

Noting that President Bush says he would have invaded even knowing what he knows now, and that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry says he would not have, the newspaper opined, "Yet in reality no president could have known what is known now. As long as Saddam Hussein remained in power and refused to cooperate fully with the United Nations, there could have been no certainty about his weapons. ...

"What can't be known is what would have happened had Mr. Bush chosen not to invade. Here, the new report suggests some answers. Saddam Hussein, it says, was focused on ending international sanctions, which were crumbling before the crisis began. Had he succeeded, he would have resumed production of chemical weapons and probably a nuclear program as well. Mr. Kerry suggested recently that Saddam Hussein's regime would have collapsed under the inspectors' pressure. That is one possibility; another is that it would have re-emerged as a significant power in the Middle East, and as a de facto or real ally of the Islamic extremist forces with which the United States is at war."

The newspaper said the larger question "is how, or even whether, decisions about pre-emptive war can be made in the absence of unambiguous intelligence."

[Pfesser]

Also from Inside Politics:

Duelfer vs. Kennedy
Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, refused to back down Wednesday when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, denounced the continued search for weapons of mass destruction as a waste of time and money.

After noting that Mr. Duelfer has more than a thousand people on his staff, Mr. Kennedy went on the attack.

"But isn't this a total waste of money? I mean, why does the search keep going on, and on and on, and aren't we at the point where we have to admit the stockpiles don't exist, and then, what's obviously become a wild goose chase?"

Mr. Duelfer strenuously objected to the term "wild goose chase."

"We've had a ... couple of people die; we've had many people wounded," Mr. Duelfer said. "And to tell them that they've been involved in a wild goose chase, to me is — it's not really what we were doing."

[sam_paine]

"We're not really -- that's not really a goose chase" is his resounding steel-spined answer? Pfft.