To: Win Smith who wrote (123226 ) 1/14/2004 7:42:00 PM From: carranza2 Read Replies (1) | Respond to Good grief, Win, you are doing exactly what you accuse the Adminstration of doing.You too were a believer in the idea that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. How did that happen and on what evidence did you come to that conclusion? My evidence came straight from the intelligence community. As an analyst at the CIA and as a member of the NSC when Hussein Kamel defected, everything I saw indicated that the Iraqis still had these programs. When I went back to the NSC in the late 1990s, I was simply relying on the intelligence community to tell me what the right answer was. I did not simply accept their judgment uncritically, however. I did press them, and I asked them why they thought what they thought. They seemed to have reasonable answers and sources out there. I pressed them on why they believed their sources, and they responded with what seemed like a reasonable set of suppositions. I was certainly not alone in this—this was a consensus among the U.S. government, it was a consensus among the UN inspectors, it was a consensus of American experts outside the U.S. government. In fact, it was a consensus in the entire international community. and based on national security issues--they always overlap, despite the old saw that national security issues should transcend politics. The decision, I think, was to take out Saddam during Bush's first term as there is no certainty that he would be re-elected. A Dem President would quite possibly face greater dangers from Saddam yet be unwilling to do what needed to be done. I think this adequately explains the timing, which seems to be an issue that troubles reasonable people like Pollack. Because the timing was critical, the political job of getting the thing done took precedence, though ultimately it was a national security issue whose end result was amply justified for a large number of reasons that have been discussed here at great length.
