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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (19283)	5/19/2003 10:31:20 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 89467

Yes, lots of worrisome stuff is (and was) unaccounted for. Everyone agrees on that: me, you, the UN, the Bush Admin. What happened to it? Bush said it got made into WMD, and Iraq still had them when our soldiers crossed the border. The problem with this explanation is, it needs some implausible assumptions, for which there is no evidence. Like saying they all got snuck across the border into Syria, at the last moment. Or they are all still in Iraq, very well hidden. Or they all got destroyed, at the last moment. Remember, what we were told, was not just that Iraq had WMD, but that they had developed and manufactured them. In mass quantities. This requires years of R&D effort by large scientific teams. We now have those scientists in our hands, they have nothing to fear from Saddam any more. Yet they are still saying exactly what they said pre-war: the WMD were destroyed years ago. After the big R&D effort, each of the various alleged WMD requires a large industrial complex, to manufacture them. If it were just a few mobile labs, or a few tanker trucks, it would be reasonable to think they could have been hidden or destroyed at the last moment. It is not reasonable to think that multiple industrial complexes just vanished in an instant. Here's an explanation that does not require unreasonable or heroic assumptions: 1. In the chaos of two wars, rebellions in the north and south, a nation under siege, a lot of records and equipment and supplies got lost. Our own military, in peace-time, has lost billions in supplies, and can't account for them. It would be surprising and implausible, if the Iraqis had managed to keep track of everything through all that. 2. Iraq tried to keep its WMD program going after 1991, but then gave it up, sometime before the inspections started back up. They saw after Afghanistan (at the latest) that they were next, and they destroyed everything. That is, the sanctions and inspections and threats of force worked. France, Germany, Russia, the UN, Blix, all were right, and Bush was wrong: measures short of Regime Change had worked, to end Iraq's WMDs. The inspections, when they resumed, found nothing, because there was nothing left to find. And we, in turn, have found nothing, for the same reason.