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

To: carranza2 who wrote (136201)	6/10/2004 8:05:14 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Naturally, the fact that Saddam's WMD efforts, particularly nuclear, were not as far along as everyone thought suggests that we had more time to deal with him than everyone thought Yes and no. As one side effect of the Iraq War, we uncovered an entire nuclear black market whose existence we had been unaware of - and not a small one. Who could say for sure what time Saddam would have needed to acquire a Pakistani or North Korean nuke?

To: carranza2 who wrote (136201)	6/10/2004 8:05:41 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

In the spirit of Reagan, I am not going to stoop to the level of insulting you. However, if you insult me again, I will put you on permanent Ignore. You will not receive any further warning. If you want to talk, please do so with courtesy. I recognize that you are arguing that you rested your support for the war against Iraq on Pollock's arguments. I did not. I never even read Pollack's book. My line was "it's the WMD, stupid." I based my support for the war based on what Bush, Powell, Cheney, and Rice said, orally in speeches that they gave, and in writing, that Saddam already had stockpiles of chemical and biological WMD, and that he was actively working on developing nuclear weapons using enriched uranium, and that it was too dangerous to wait until the threat was imminent. One example, we spent billions stockpiling smallpox vaccine, which I believed we never would have done if we had not known that Saddam had smallpox stockpiles. Another example, we were told that the aluminim tubes Saddam imported, or attempted to import, could only be used for gas centrifuges in order to enrich uranium. Another example, we were told that Saddam had mobile chemical and biological weapons labs built onto trucks. All of this turned out to be mistaken. Every bit of it. The reasons are not fully known yet, but will become known over time. Chalabi, we now know, was the source of much of the intelligence, and he was acting as a double agent for Iran, which benefits from Saddam's loss of power. Chalabi hoped to become a powerful man in his own country again, so was promoting his own interests, as well. I doubt that this is the entire story, but expect to live long enough for the rest of the facts to come out. By Pollack's "mea culpa", I mean his acknowledgement that the intelligence I just described was wrong, and his explanation about what he thought led to the process whereby wrong information was relied upon by himself, and passed on. Finally, we agree that the world is a better place now that Saddam is gone.