I never thought that Iraq would use weapons of mass destruction against our troops, for two reasons: it would have proven the United States right, and it would have invited severe retaliation. Yes, they prepared for a worst case scenario, but the very timetable used for the fall of Baghdad shows that the military did not expect to be "slimed", which conforms to my recollections of comments made at the time. As for whether he had too much to ship to Syria, that depends solely on the time frame. If much of the material was vacated in anticipation of inspections, that is clearly not the case.
Saddam never merely welcomed inspectors and let them go wherever they wanted. There was foot dragging and lack of cooperation in most instances, with occassional greater cooperation when the United States seemed closer to an attack.
The inspectors were not there to "catch Saddam", but to try to verify his information. The fact is, they thought he had substantial stockpiles, due to inadequte compliance records, and were frustrated with the inability to question scientists without minders.
We do not know precisely what intelligence the White House was willing to hand over. The fact is, there is substantial evidence of infiltration during the earlier inspection regime, so that members of the inspection regime were feeding information to Saddam. There was mounting evidence of an intelligence breach in the last inspection regime. Thus, the White House might well have given the inspectors fairly old intelligence, so that their sources were protected.
I have no idea what "plenty of time" would be. They just got the material from the scientists with the hidden centrifuges and documents. They have hardly had time to translate the documents found a couple of weeks ago. I have no idea how long members of the regime might hold out if they thought they could get better deals.
Everything that the Administration said turned out to be more or less true. There was a big welcome for US troops, just not universally. The locals are not shooting the shit out of us, some elements of the Saddam regime are resisting, but they have succeeded in killing about one soldier per day, which is more like gang violence than guerilla war. We have improved the quality of life for many Iraqis, in fact. I read a great article in the Washington Post about that recently. However, in some areas there remains a problem with sabotage. The Iraqi military did surrender in large numbers, or melted away, which, after all, was what the leaflets suggested ("Lay down your arms and go home"). It is well known that the Shi'ites were held hostage by a special concentration of Ba'athists, and as soon as that resistance had been broken, they did rise up.
So, although there is a question about the WMDs, mostly your characterizations are false or exaggerated. |
