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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (69848)	1/12/2009 11:30:02 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Saddam invaded Kuwait to get the oil and the territory. Sure. But if we didn't import as much oil, he would still likely have done it. Saddam's WMDs were gas filled artillery shells. And other forms of dispersing gas. Those where the WMDs he actually once had. He also had a program to try and get nuclear weapons and a program to try to get bacteriological weapons. These programs where suspended after the first war and inspections, but he covered up the suspensions enough that we couldn't be sure that he didn't have an actual active program (at least a small and so probably slow one). And even the suspended programs could have been restarted at any time. The Iraqi government had an obligation to fully comply with the inspections, but they didn't. Had they done so the justification for an invasion would have been much less, but when they didn't fully comply we couldn't be certain about the state of their program, and also the act of non-compliance, even with no active WMD program, violated the cease fire agreement. In any case your moving to new points that are less relevant to the issue that was being discussed. Assuming that Iraq had zero percent chance of every having any WMD in the future would not only be an unjustified assumption, but also not an indication that Iraq would not have been invaded by the US in 2003, if we had reduced our oil imports before 2003. The assumption (or more mild and probably more realistic assumptions that don't go as far, saying only that Iraq wasn't about to get WMD any time soon or something like that) can be used to argue that we shouldn't have invaded Iraq, but that's a different question. Even if you assume that we should not have invaded Iraq, that doesn't make the invasion of Iraq and externality from our oil imports.