Posted on 04/07/2005 5:27:24 AM PDT by SJackson
And this is news?
The belief in the existence of WMDs kept Saddam in power. W called his bluff.
Among my peers, once the 2000 election was finalized, we joked that Saddam's days were numbered and that with this administration, there was unfinished business and that it would be done. Wasn't sure why or how, just knew that it was a given. 9/11 gave the reason. But I still believe had 9/11 had not happened, there still would have been some trigger point that would be our cue to proceed. Yes, Saddam was a bad boy and would have tempted fate. And yes, he was a goner was the oath was taken in January 2001.
I don't think so. I think Saddam was thumbing his nose at the sanctions and agreements. Saddam sought a confrontation with the US and the UN. If he had won that battle, the whole world would have known that we were paper tigers. Saddam was already sponsoring terrorism and we declared war on all terrorism after 9/11. If we had ignored Saddam, he would have become the terrorism kingpin, hiding them beneath his military.
Saddam gambled and lost.
Except for God, there are no absolutes. A commission that says we were absolutely totally wrong about Iraq's weapons doesn't pass the smell test.
As in anything, there has to be shades of gray regarding what weapons Iraq possessed.
I'm not convinced this report isn't some political document in itself.
Bush's case for war assumed Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, but was aimed at stopping his efforts to get them.
My son will be risking his life in Iraq soon. He and I never thought this has anything to do with WMD and everything to do with strategic control over the mideast.
Ergo
We should not have gone into Iraq.
='s Liberal logic.
WMD or no WMD. It doesn't matter. Saddam had his troops active shooting at our aircraft in the NFZs. We needed to finish the job from 1991 that Clinton and Bush Senior refused to do or stay there forever.
I think we are in Iraq a bit longer than most of us care, but it has made a significant difference to the world at large and our security. We will leave there, maybe just not tomorrow.
The real WMD in Iraq were Uday and Qusay Hussein. Saddam's reign would have been a picnic compared to what those two would have wrought.
The fall of Saddam is the keystone to the Bush doctrine. That doctrine is likely the legacy of the President. And a good one. It probably is the right course of action and it needed to be established if there is ever a chance of bringing the middle east to some sort of westerm style political and social situation.
But to say that Saddam thumbing his nose to weapons inspections caused the invastion IMHO is naive.
Saddam did not deserve the benefit of the doubt. End of story.
Hmmmm.......What did we find in Libya? What might be in Syria?
To start with the intelligence services are instruments in the hands of the political leadership. Direction as to what to look for must come from the political leadership. What is presented as a failure of intelligence, therefore, may well be a political failure"
Taheri is usually pretty good--but in this case he's absolutely wrong> It's a dangerous idea. You DONT want intelligence direction from politicians because then you are guaranteed to get skewed information. Rather than telling the intelligence agencies what to look for (which often implies a set of attitudes and politically desirable outcomes) you want them to look for the truth--and then mold your political strategies around reality.
and WMDs are small when not in the munitions. All of what Powell spoke of before the U.N. would fit in two large tanker trucks worth of volume. The Anthrax would fit in a typical bedroom unless dried - in which case it would fit in the closet.
Clearly. there is little to no excuse in not resuming the invasion in 1994 - and the case (for not invading) became even weaker from there. Unfortunately, by then, Clinton had already effectively dismantled the coalition.
Read the WMD report out 3/31. Our intel community screwed up BIG TIME.Suppose we knew that the WMD Report says what it does in order to protect other "friendly" nations as well as a previous US administration who were complicit in Sadaam having the weapons in the first place.
Sometimes you have to simply admit that we don't know what we don't know. Speculation is pointless.
That wasn't entirely erroneous, you know. And this is germane with respect to the current question.
The intelligence game is rife with hindsight - this statement proves it. You always have an incomplete picture of what the opponent is doing, and you always have to err to the safe side. It isn't as if the people in charge of it didn't know that there was a possibility Saddam could be faking the whole thing, but how do you bet if you don't know and the safety of your country is at stake? Especially when at several points he most certainly did possess both WMD and programs, because he used them.
I've read most of this report. The principal bone of contention appears to be undue weight given a particular defector and doubts about his reliability that were communicated but not acted upon. This is, IMHO, an absolutely valid criticism.
But the "what if we knew Saddam had no WMD" question is, I am afraid, not the right one. We absolutely knew he had enriched uranium - the IAEA had inventoried it and two tons of it now resides in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We knew he had industrial quantities of anthrax spores because UN inspectors had seen it. The latter we cannot find now. That in itself should lead the skeptics to conclude that just because we haven't found it does not mean it never existed.
I think that recriminations concerning this report are misplaced. Certainly such things should lead to improvements in information processing and communications. But to hope that will lead to perfect intelligence offered as a basis of political decisions is a pipe dream.
BINGO.
Whether or not Iraq had significant stocks of WMDs in 2003 is almost irrelevant, and that was only one of SIX reasons Pres.Bush gave in his 2003 SOTU speech for ending Hussein's regime.
Good article.
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