Hi Noel de Leon; Re: "No proof of any WMDs yet. US will not tell inspectors where they are. Saddam says there are none and invites anyone to tell where they are if they think they are there."
The basic logic that Saddam has nuclear weapons goes like this:
(1) Saddam says he doesn't have WMDs.
(2) Bush says that the US is sure that Iraq has WMDs.
(3) Saddam has a history of lying, and even now says things that are ridiculous.
(4) Bush, while a politician, has a better reputation than Saddam does.
(5) Since Bush is more believable, Iraq must have WMDs.
The major fly in the ointment on this logical sequence is that Bush seems peculiarly inadequate at actually showing that Iraq has WMDs. This is in stark contrast to Kennedy, for example, who made public photographs showing WMDs in Cuba.
While I have no doubt that Saddam lies frequently, I also observe that 80% of the human population will lie like dogs when they can get away with it, and the remaining 20% exaggerate like fishermen. But people are not like those characters in stupid logic games which must always tell the truth or must always tell exactly the opposite of the truth. Instead, people lie when it is to their advantage to lie.
It is the position of the war party that Saddam is lying, and that therefore he will be killed in a war. Some advantage, LOL.
No, the fact is not that Saddam is a pathological liar, but instead that he is a perfectly normal liar. And by the logic of the war party, it is clearly to the disadvantage of Saddam to lie about WMDs.
The war party has recognized this logical conundrum, and their solution to it is that WMDs are such an immense advantage to Saddam that he would risk almost certain detection, and therefore death, to retain them. And what are the advantages of WMDs? Saddam can't use them to blackmail his neighbors because his possession of them would give the US the leverage needed to make war against him. So some of the war party argue that Saddam needs WMDs to keep his citizens in line, LOL. This is silly. Dictatorships, some of them lasting hundreds if not nearly thousands of year, exist in the historical record from long before WMDs were a twinkle in the eye of the industrialized era.
But if Saddam doesn't have WMDs, then why was Bush going on and on about them?
To answer this question, you have to analyze the true nature of a leader.
I doubt that Bush can interpret aerial photographs or understand Arabic phone taps. He is not the person who obtained the evidence for Iraqi WMDs, nor is he the person who interpreted that evidence. Instead, it is people who work for Bush who collected together that evidence.
The problem with Bush's leadership is that he made it too clear that he wanted for Iraq to possess WMDs. That attitude is passed down the line, and it makes the people who work for him shade their reports in that direction. This is only human nature and it is found in every human organization. To fight against it is very difficult.
There is a game that children play where you get about 10 kids and arrange them in a line. You tell something to the first kid, who then tells it to the next, and it repeats down the line to the last one. The joke is that no matter how hard they try to transmit the "truth", by the time the statement reaches the end it is virtually unrecognizable from the start.
This game also applies to adult humans. I've seen it myself in the companies I work for. (a) Humans tend to hear what it is that they want to hear, and employees tend to tell bosses what it is that their bosses want to hear. The combination of the two effects is almost impossible to resist.
This is what happened to Bush. Reports that indicated that Iraq "might" still be working on WMDs were recopied and retold sufficient times that they became tales that Iraq still owned WMDs. And now that it's time to show the cards, Bush has no cards to show.
-- Carl
P.S. (a) Once, my boss asked me to solve a certain problem in a product. I took a quick look at it and told him that it was impossible to fix and would require a complete redesign. He told me to look at it some more. Then he went to his boss and told him "Carl is working on it." His boss told the big boss "engineering will have it working within 2 days." Like the children, everyone in the chain heard what he wanted to hear, and told his boss what they wanted to hear. By the time the information had travelled through only two intervening people, the sense of the data was entirely reversed.
For those who care, the bird has is now sleeping. |
