Dan -
I say that speaking about an "uncooperative Iraq" is revisionism, because Iraq was cooperating more completely than they ever had before. Was it perfect? No. But the situation was improving.
When the inspectors were saying that they wanted to have more time to complete the inspections, and that they were "getting access to the sites", I think it would have been prudent to give them that time, despite the fact that cooperation may not have been perfect.
Blix said "A great many questions remain". So why wouldn't we try to get those questions answered?
>>Then too, we find that "The inspectors say Iraq must produce credible evidence to back up its stance that it destroyed all material that could be used for weapons of mass destruction while U.N. teams were out of the country from 1998 to late last year." In this case, Iraq failed to back-up its claims, we eventually found that Iraq had outright lied, since we in fact found the massive quantities of your "raw materials that could have been used to produce massive amounts of chemical weapons, but could also have been used to make things like insecticides(or fertilizer I believe, as the case may be - Dan B.)<<
Did we really find these massive quantities of raw materials? I haven't seen evidence of that. In any case, once again, the inspectors were still in the process of getting information, and should have been allowed to do their jobs. That is what leaving war as the last resort means. You do everything you can to avoid it. Bush didn't do that.
I love the line you put in bold, from Bush's State of the Union address, 2003: "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."
That is a classic straw-man propaganda line. It's a meaningless argument. Nobody, even the most vocal opponents to the war, ever suggested that we trust in Saddam's sanity or restraint. We were enforcing no-fly zones. We had U.N. inspectors on the ground. We had embargoes in place, and more. That is not "trusting in Saddam's sanity".
And by the way, who are these people at GlobalSecurity.org, anyway? They claim to be a "reliable source of information" but there's really no indication on their site of who they are or how they acquire their data.
- Allen |
