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

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (159969)	3/31/2005 6:18:21 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

They did voice doubts about WMD...in fact they said the reason they were against the war was precisely because of that. They said give the weapons inspectors time to do their work. They could only "voice doubts" sotto voce because even though their own intelligence said that Saddam had WMDs, they knew to a 99% chance that the inspectors would find nothing whether there was anything to find or not. If their intelligence service had said that Saddam didn't have WMDs, then they would have said, "Our intelligence tells us that Saddam has nothing, and here's why, but just to be sure, let's have the inspectors in for six more months..." That would have been a much stronger case for them. They didn't say it because their intelligence was the same as everybody else's and they would have looked like total shills for Saddam. Chirac wanted to look like the new leader of the EU, not Baghdad Bob.

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (159969)	3/31/2005 7:21:52 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Orca, Saddam had a long love affair with every system of advanced weaponry known to man. He had (and used) chemical weapons against the Iranians and the Kurds, he had a nuclear program, he had a bioweapons program, he tried to develop a super gun. When sanctions he fell on him he tried to evade them with every strategem of non-cooperation and bribery he could come up with. He lost billions of revenue due to the sanctions, but never complied with them. This is not contested by anybody. Or perhaps I should add, by anybody with actual knowledge of Iraq. Some people think saying "no" is an argument, whatever the facts. So what is it that makes you believe that intelligence services somehow "knew" that Saddam was doing all this for no reason, since he was innocent of every sanctions-busting missile and WMD, and that I must have been brainwashed by Hannity to believe otherwise? The French had literally billions of reasons to want to give the inspectors "time to do their work", not one of which had anything to do with the actual state of Saddam's weapons programs.