Hi Neocon; Re: "Until then, the "he buried them in the sand in the last few weeks", or " he gave them to the Syrians just before the shooting started" account for the facts as well as anything else."
(1) Saddam was supposed to have way too much WMDs to secretly ship them to the Syrians. For that matter, why would he, when war was about to come?
(2) The administration was clueless as to the possibility that Saddam would do something like this. Hell, they were saying that they had secret evidence that Saddam was going to slime our troops right up to the fall of Baghdad.
(3) Not using your WMDs against an enemy invader is in violation of Saddam's "modus operandi". He used them against Iran, with some success, why not the US?
On the other hand, support for the theory that Saddam had gotten rid of them by late 2002 is rampant:
(a) In late 2002, Saddam welcomed inspectors and let them go wherever they wanted. This was in distinction to Iraq's attitude towards inspectors before that date.
(b) The inspectors found essentially no evidence of WMDs. This was in distinction to what the inspectors had found on previous inspections years before.
(c) The White House claimed to have direct evidence of WMDs in Iraq, but when they gave their evidence to the inspectors, it turned out to be bogus.
(d) The US has had plenty of time to find even one Iraqi who would tell them where those tons and tons of WMDs are hidden. Or where Syria stashed them, for that matter.
The basic problem for the Administration is that almost everything they said about Iraq turned out not to be true, with the single exception that Saddam was a bastard (which nobody disagreed with). There was no big welcome for US troops. In fact the locals are shooting the shit out of us already. They were unable to improve the conditions of life for Iraqis. The Iraqi military did not surrender in masses like it did in Kuwait. The Iraqis did not use WMDs. Nobody even found any WMDs. The Shiites in the South did not rise up and get rid of Saddam's government.
The rosiest explanation is that, in the face of confusing and conflicting evidence, the Administration believed what it wanted to believe and ignored the possibility that they might be wrong. Then they started a war without a just cause, (or at least the cause that they had enunciated before the war), and what's worse, sucked the US down into a quagmire from which the only exit is retreat.
-- Carl |
