Orca, Saddam had a long love affair with every system of advanced weaponry known to man.
You mean known to the US, don't you? There's never been a nation on the planet with a bigger love affair for weaponry the the US. You ought to write paperback novels with an opening line like that.
He had (and used) chemical weapons against the Iranians
While we looked the other way.
and the Kurds
Since we looked the other way when he used them on the Iranians...maybe he figured he could do that with impunity?
he had a nuclear program, he had a bioweapons program
Program, program get your program...sorry...baseball season is coming up.
he tried to develop a super gun.
You know most of your observations here, including this one, were pre Gulf War I incidents. A super gun is hardly an exotic weapon. It's more of a poor man's missile. A stupid idea really...because it's hard to hide and will be taken out first thing in any conflict.
When sanctions he fell on him he tried to evade them with every strategem of non-cooperation and bribery he could come up with. He lost billions of revenue due to the sanctions, but never complied with them.
If he never complied...how did he lose billions of dollars of revenue. You're talking in circles.
This is not contested by anybody. Or perhaps I should add, by anybody with actual knowledge of Iraq. Some people think saying "no" is an argument, whatever the facts.
The facts are the facts...that's certain. But there seems to be a wide difference as to what the facts were...and when those facts applied. There's a current fact...which you are ever seeming to avoid...and that is Saddam didn't have any WMD. We didn't find anything. Oh yeah...he scurried them off to Syria and the Bekah Valley...right.
So what is it that makes you believe that intelligence services somehow "knew" that Saddam was doing all this for no reason, since he was innocent of every sanctions-busting missile and WMD, and that I must have been brainwashed by Hannity to believe otherwise?
Intelligence services were going on blind estimates. No hard data. Saddam was telling his generals that he had WMD...because he wanted them to think he had them...and he really wanted the Iranians to think he had them...because he knew they had them...and he wanted to maintain a MAD (mutually assured destruction) relationship between him and his arch enemies.
The French had literally billions of reasons to want to give the inspectors "time to do their work", not one of which had anything to do with the actual state of Saddam's weapons programs.
Balderdash. The French were making no more money off Iraq than anyone else. Even Haliburton did work in Iraq before the war. The French were ready to realize the limitations of the intelligence. It's pretty simple to know what you don't know. The Bush administration made up stuff, accentuated certain estimates, and then used their own "intelligence" based on shoddy information from Chalabi and Curve ball. They never heeded the caveats of the CIA.
Tenet saying "it's a slam dunk" seems like so much good ol boy talk. When I hear someone characterizing intelligence like that with out substantiating the elements behind the conclusion...I have to think that he's full of beans. And he's the director? and they gave him a medal? I'd have fired his ass and then booted it out the door.
Orca |
