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Politics : Piffer Thread on Political Rantings and Ravings -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gamesmistress who wrote (12283)	1/21/2004 10:53:08 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14610

You can say that because no WMDs have been found Americans were misled Not really because they are not found, but because Bush administration knew they would not be found. You may have noticed the myriad discussions in the media since the invasion of Iraq about how intelligence was manipulated to give the impression that Iraq was an imminent threat ("Saddam is in the process of procuring nuclear stuff", "He is six months away from nuclear capability" etc). At which level it was conjured is still being debated, but not many have doubts at this point that there was an effort to mislead the American nation regarding the WMDs of Iraq. If you have somehow missed all that, I can try to put together a couple of analyses on the subject at some point for you. >>Was invasion and subsequent occupation the only way?<<< To make Saddam get rid of the WMDs? Saddam wasn't cooperating with UN inspectors In the run-up to the war, Saddam allowed inspectors back into Iraq with unlimited access. We also know now that he used backchannels to convey a message to the White House that he was ready to do essentially just about anything to avoid an invasion, including UN-supervised elections and letting US inspectors roam around Iraq looking for weapons. Perle passed the offer to the guys higher up and the answer he received was "Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad". It does look like cooperation was being offered but the Bush administration was too eager to invade Iraq to take up the offer. When we look at the world, Saddam's Iraq was in no way the most dangerous a threat (definitely less than N. Korea), definitely not the most armed (doesn't even have the nukes Pakistan and India has), has been weakened and subdued by sanctions and inspections, and had no demonstrable link to terrorism and Al-Qaeda (like Syria, for example). Even on a humanitarian angle, Iraq was not even close to being the worst disaster spot of the planet. Why did the US invade Iraq last year, then? The answer is WMDs.