[Bloody Sam Roberts]

That is why Condi Rice said we need to forgive the Russians.

This would indicate that that people at State and elsewhere (NSA?) knew about the whole thing beforehand. They need to be weeded out and seriously smacked down. If that means Condi, so be it.

[BobS]

Condi Rice is correct. Russian people are actually nice, just like us. They just have a management problem to work through. Their approach to democracy will not be like ours.

Of course we will get mad at each other at times. We are not going to war, though.

[piasa]

Two things serve our national interests, though they do not benefit the US administration politically : First, any WMD that Russia removed before the war, benefitted us by removing WMD that could have been used against US troops in the invasion when it came.

That benefit outweighs the political "show and tell" benefit of finding WMD in Iraq.

Second, the UN sanctions on Iraq remain in pace until such time as Iraq is certified "free of WMD" by UN inspectors- last I heard we still aren't letting the UN inspectors in. The UN is not cooperating with the establishment of new government in Iraq, it is instead holding the new government to standards it was willing to ignore for the old government, because UN officials aren't concerned about Iraq's welfare, they are miffed about being cut off from the oil for food gravy train. The reconstruction of Iraq is very difficult with trading limited and made more difficult by sanctions- and the UN - particularly the French- is playing political games at Iraq's expense. Whether they can still justify sanctions once there are free elections, I don't know- but they can do so now.

What this means is that even if the US finds WMD in Iraq, it is better for us to remove them or have them removed quietly and secured or destroyed so that when the UN inspectors have their final look-see, there will be nothing for them to find to justify maintaining sanctions. Politically it may be damaging to us to not find them, but our goals appear to be better served if we don't.

Just a note for people to chew on: the US has been destroying its own nerve gas supplies during the time period we were occupying Iraq's chemical weapons sites. It would provie cover for destroying Iraq's as well.

We have also been quick to very openly remove Libya's uranium to the US- Libya's uranium came from Niger, the country we were assured by the left and by the IAEA could not have been seling uranium on the sly to Iraq. It would not be difficult for us to include any unaccounted for Iraqi uranium in the supplies shipped to the US as "Libyan" either, leaving Iraq clean as a whistle for sanctions-lifting purposes.

Just a theory.