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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: Sun Tzu who wrote (162115)5/15/2005 4:35:48 PM
From: Nadine Carroll   of 281500
 
Even if the author believed that

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

This is very different thing from saying that the either the existence of terrorism or WMDs as threats were being invented from nothing, and he never says that. The threat of terrorism was pretty obvious. It would have been a brave man indeed, who argued that Saddam had given up WMDs, despite having used them in the past, having kept them in spite of sanctions, having deceived the UN inspectors multiple times and then tossed them out.

The more questionable claim was the degree of coordination between Saddam and terrorists, despite Saddam's known support of Palestinian suicide bombers and Ansar-al-Islam, and it is this coordination that the author is questioning.

This notion of some dark 'star chamber' where Rumsfield and Cheney get the scoop that the intelligence and defense agencies of the US and UK don't is rather fantastical. The intelligence agencies of the US and the US (and Germany, France and Israel for that matter) believed that Saddam still retained WMDs and certainly WMD capacity. That was their position. Nothing in this memo contradicts that and it is you who are misreading it if you think otherwise.
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