| One of the problems is that there is a whole level of foreign policy discussion that most people ignored during the last decade. I have known for some time that Saddam was likely to be a target. This did not suddenly arise out of thin air. Containment was costly and there was always a threat of easing off of the regime. Saddam abused the loophole in the sanctions regime, providing for oil sales for medicine and food, in order to divert money to his own projects. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died, indirectly because of the sanctions. This was becoming intolerable. All intelligence services, not just the CIA, agreed that he had a substantial WMD capacity, and was seeking to acquire a nuclear capability. We were under the threat that Saddam would succeed in getting a clean bill of health from inspections, causing containment to falter, only to further enhance his destructive capacity. This was a problem for two reasons: we had reason to suspect that Saddam was involved with several terrorist organizations, including Al Qaida, and could therefore supply WMDs for unconventional delivery to such groups. Second, it was well- known that Saddam aspired to regional hegemony, and to the elimination of Israel, which meant that he might gain control of the Arabian peninsula (and extort the developed world), and either destroy Israel, or engage in a fight to the death, thus bringing about a crisis in the region, and a humanitarian catastrophe. It was time to deal with Iraq once and for all........ |
