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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (101660)	6/15/2003 10:39:38 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<<Everybody in Iraq must know that anyone who comes to the Americans with details on WMD will be able to name his price. If they are around, why isn't anybody talking? Hard to believe that Saddam could be that efficient. Still a mystery.>> Saddam always put out a lot of bluster. He ruled through a combination of bluster and violence. Some of his WMD talk was bluster--"See how powerful I am, you better not mess with me." IMHO, of course.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (101660)	6/16/2003 1:30:18 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Two plain facts: 1. The administration needed to portray Iraq as a real threat in order to win support for the war. 2. The administration chose to emphasize the WMD issue I think you left a step out. The administration needed a simple sound-biteable reason to to got war in Iraq: 'threat' is the simplest of reasons; agreed. But the missing step is: the administration decided, for various reasons, to go the UN for support. This required the US to argue as a main reason, that Saddam was in breach of UN resolutions, most of which dealt with disarming and weapons inspections. Ergo. I think if the administration had skipped the UN, as the hawks wanted to do, they would have argued more about the breakdown of containment, and how Saddam was building palaces with the oil-for-food money while starving his people, and what he planned to do if he kicked us out of the Gulf, and the support he was giving to terrorists. But we'll never know that for sure. So having gone to the UN, WMD arguments just sort of bubbled to the fore. Now all I can say is that if Saddam had our intelligence fooled about still having WMDs, we were in good company - everybody's intelligence was fooled on that score, including the UNSCOM inspectors. I still think the stuff was moved to Syria and hidden. We'll find out in time. As for the rest, I don't get too excited about people who are "shocked, shocked" to discover that politicians will sometimes make a case using imperfect intelligence. 99 times out of 100, imperfect intelligence is all that's available. Sure we need an investigation, which will take time. In the meantime, I sure could do with less screaming about it.