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

To: Ilaine who wrote (101905)	6/21/2003 9:21:51 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I don't think it's impossible for the data to be faked, but I doubt it very much, and I also doubt that the current Bush administration faked it, if it was faked. I don’t know how many times I have to say this. I don’t think data was faked. I suspect that there may have been deliberately distorted interpretations of data. Specifically, I suspect that data coming from sources that had a strong vested interest in promoting a US invasion may have been given excessive weight, and that a decision may have been made to overlook the possible distortions created by that vested interest. I "know" the weapons were there, in the sense that you can know anything that you've only read and not experienced personally. I also "know" that the capability was there. I don’t doubt that at some point weapons were there. What I question is the threat assessment. Here’s a possibility that I think deserves consideration. We all know, or should, that developing a chemical or biological weapon is relatively easy, compared to developing an effective delivery system. CBW have not been used terribly frequently, not because they are so horrible, but because they are actually fairly difficult to use effectively. It’s easy to gas a civilian village with no air defense. You just fly over and spray the stuff. It is a bit more difficult, though still feasible, to use CBW against a relatively primitive army like the one the Iranians sent to the field against Iraq (though there is no indication that Iraq’s use of gas during that war was ever decisive or terribly effective). It is very, very, difficult to use these weapons effectively against a modern army, and it is not at all easy to use them in a large-scale terror scenario. I think it’s entirely likely that Saddam had a fairly primitive WMD capacity, but knew that it was never going to be really effective. That would explain why he wouldn’t allow inspectors: his deterrent would be exposed as a paper tiger, and he’d take all of the blame for having WMD while losing any deterrent advantage they provided. I suspect that there wasn’t that much of the stuff to begin with, and that much of it was probably destroyed when it was clear that the bluff was going to be called. The danger, of course, is that it wasn’t all destroyed, and that some may have been provided to terrorists, sent to Syria, or retained by Baath loyalists. It’s difficult to use these things for a massive terror attack, but that doesn’t mean it’s stuff we want circulating. None of this explains the enormous hype, of course, but what the hell, we won the war, so who cares if they pumped up the threat. So please excuse me if I scoff at the present argument that the WMD were never there. The present argument, from me at least, is not that they were never there, but that the threat they posed may have been deliberately distorted. I don’t know who is making other arguments – I read only posts addressed to me, and occasionally the most recent 40 – and I see no reason to bring them into this dialogue.