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

To: Neocon who wrote (99571)	5/30/2003 4:03:54 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

NC, We seem to be talking past one another. You say your understanding was thus and so. Mine was not much different. But I'm talking about something different that will become the focus. Which is what the administration used to justify an invasion in the spring of 03 rather than wait for the inspections to work or not do an invasion at all. The language was imminent threat language. This put in question several things: the resolve to sustain a costly deployment indefinitely; the possibility of Saddam using terrorist agents to drive out American forces in the region; the ability to wage battle in the summer months, if it came to that; the effect of pressure from the Saudis to leave; and so forth. The Administration basically said, why give him all the time in the world, when he is in material violation, and seems unwilling to amend his behavior? I never got anything else out of the footage your refer to. I saw these motives in play, some more prominently than others. But the Bush folk needed things far more pressing than this to justify an invasion. For whatever reason, they latched onto the wmds. I think the basic point you make may well become the fallback point for the Bush folk, that since Saddam was already in violation of UN resolutions and US troops were there, in some jeapordy, and the hot summer months were coming on, it had to be done then rather than later. But had we known the level of wmds in Iraq were as we now believe, the US Senate would not have voted as it did, the levels of support in public opinion in the US for an invasion would have been markedly lower. And, couple that with the fact there has never been a credible connection between Al Q and Saddam, had that become more obvious, the Bush folk would have been hard pressed to manage an invasion. I think the Bush folk will have a hard time down the road making the case the invasion was not based on deception at some level in their administration. As for whether the intelligence was up to the minute, best I can tell from this distance, the CIA intelligence was, while the other sources the DOD depended on wrapped their "intelligence" in a definite agenda. Which meshed well with the agenda of the Bush folk which was to find some reason, any reason to invade Iraq that would garner enough public support to get the job done.