You wouldn't know "strategic importance" if it came up and kicked you in the butt.
So it was OK for Slick to state Iraq had WMD from at least 1992 to 2004, but not OK for Bush to believe for a second? Is THAT your story?
Clinton believed as late as 2004 that Iraq had WMDs.
"LISBON (AFP) Jan 09, 2004
Former US president Bill Clinton said in October during a visit to Portugal that he was convinced Iraq had weapons of mass destruction up until the fall of Saddam Hussein, Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said late Thursday.
"When Clinton was here recently he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime," he said in an interview with Portuguese cable news channel SIC Noticias."
spacewar.com
tonyspencer.com
What now, Stupid? You better stick to the Lect Wing Echo Chambers run by Baker and Ikky. You're not up to handing the real world.
Here, have some more:
"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..."
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003
glennbeck.com
There's a source there, dork. I don't specialize in your habit of making wild, baseless claims and then refusing to back them.
These are your buddies:
"Clinton sought to pursue an intensified version of the strategy of the first Bush administration. His administration carried out repeated cruise missile strikes and two brief but bloody bombing campaigns, organized provocations by the UN inspectors, maintained the sanctions and the “no-fly” zones, and infiltrated CIA agents among the UN inspectors in order to plan the assassination of Saddam Hussein. Clinton also authorized several abortive coup attempts, as well as overt CIA terrorist actions, including those carried out in the mid-1990s by Ayad Allawi, now the US-appointed interim prime minister. Clinton also signed the Iraq Liberation Act, making “regime change” the official policy of the United States."
wsws.org
"But who exactly got it wrong? Intelligence agencies obviously exaggerated Iraq's WMD potential, and it's well known that they were egged on by their political masters in the Bush administration. But that's not the whole story. In fact, Bush's manipulation of Iraq intelligence was built on a foundation established during the late 1990's, when Bill Clinton was in the White House.
Faced with the need to justify an economically devastating and internationally unpopular embargo of Iraq, the Clinton administration engaged in a pattern of stretching and distorting weapons data to bolster their claim that Saddam Hussein was still hiding an illicit arsenal. The Clinton White House never used that "intelligence" to push for an invasion of Iraq, as Bush so effectively did. But in its desperate quest to salvage a crumbling Iraq policy, the Clinton White House laid the groundwork for the deceptions of their successors."
mojones.com
Shrillary?
"President Bush and two inspectors he appointed to find the weapons have all said the evidence of the weapons has not turned up, and the president announced shortly after he won the 2004 elections that the search for Saddam's WMD was over. But at the same time, Mr. Hoekstra is not alone in his concerns about the whereabouts of Saddam's arsenal. Prime Minister Sharon and his Israel Defense Force chief of staff during the Iraq war, Moshe Yaalon, have said weapons were transferred from Iraq to Syria before the war, a view also promoted by a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada. Senator Clinton last week acknowledged that the possibility is still a live one, saying, "there were no weapons, or if there were, they certainly weren't used or they were in some way disposed of or taken out of the country."
In the weeks before and following the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, at least 10 facilities believed by American, European, and Israeli intelligence to be for the production and research of chemical and biological weapons were systematically looted by members of Iraq's Republican Guard, ordered by the regime's leadership to destroy and hide evidence of the programs, according to current and former intelligence officials from America, Britain and Israel. In interviews with the New York Sun, these officials reflect the position of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in the months after the war: "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."
nysun.com |
