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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (61075)	12/11/2002 1:31:23 PM
From: jcky	Respond to of 281500

During the air campaign alone, yes. But we cannot know (at least without finding a witness) if Saddam gave the orders for chemical warheads when the Americans invaded. Arming chemical weapons must be done by trained technicians shortly before they are fired, from what I have read. We may simply have overrun the Iraqi positions before the munitions could be armed. Plausible? Yes. Probable? I say highly unlikely and no witnesses among the ten of thousands of Iraqi soldiers we captured? It is important to keep a reference to the time line in order to understand why this is still a great stretch by all accounts. The use of the Scud missiles did not begin until well after the ground invasion of Kuwait. If Saddam intended to use WMDs with his Scuds, there would have been ample opportunity for his soldiers to retrofit the mobile Scud platforms just as there were plenty of opportunity for Saddam to launch Scud attacks against Israel, which by the way, did not contain any chemical or biologic agents. No matter how you slice it, considering the results of Saddam's little adventures (and the article you cited omitted some of them, like the attempt to reinvade Kuwait in 1994), you can hardly avoid the conclusion that Saddam is prone to aggression and wild miscalculation. Prone to aggression and miscalculation? Yes, but that hardly distinguished Saddam in the domain of world politics.