Some observations on the French at the time:
The French sources said it has French intelligence information saying that Iraq has relaunched its program to produce mass destruction weapons.
arabicnews.com
Another problem with the idea that Bush was pushing for intelligence findings that went beyond the evidence, is that the UN Security Council including FRANCE and Syria voted unanimously for Resolution 1441 which stated that Hussein was in gross violation of UN previous resolutions, meaning that he was already in possession of chemical and biological stocks. And the Council members didn’t reach these conclusions just by swallowing U.S. intelligence reports. The Security Council and the UN weapons inspectors had had their own years-long experience of dealing with Saddam. Yet when FRANCE and other countries betrayed the U.S. in the aftermath of Resolution 1441, conducting an all-out campaign to bufuddle and isolate the U.S., none of these countries which were so fervidly against the war, including our chief adversary FRANCE, even hinted that the weapons didn’t exist. They just said that inspections would be the more effective way of finding and eliminating them than war. Given that these countries were behaving as virtual enemies of the U.S., if they had had any information that the weapons didn’t exist, a revelation that would have shattered the U.S. position, wouldn’t they have said so at the time?
Let us also remember that in 1998 then-President Clinton formally declared that Hussein’s WMDs program represented an ongoing threat, and made it official U.S. policy to seek regime change in Iraq. Of course, Clinton in the end did nothing to end the Hussein regime but ended the UN inspections regime instead, leaving Hussein at liberty to keep acquiring and improving on his weapons capacities. If, then, you believe the conspiracy theorists, you’d have to believe that Clinton—who had no intention of toppling Hussein—was nevertheless as involved as Bush was in forcing unjustified conclusions about the existence of WMDs.
So the theory that Bush was stretching or cooking the evidence is unsustainable. It was not just the president and his advisors, but every involved and knowledgeable party, both pro-war and anti-war, both in America and abroad, who fully believed and stipulated that the weapons were there.
amnation.com |
