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

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (70018)	1/21/2009 11:23:30 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

It called out loudly when you claimed Iraq was "a dangerous power". America gets bombed and somebody pays. That's what serious military powers do. Iraq got bombed and did nothing. Iraq was fairly serious power to its neighbors, but had limited ability to project its power. It wasn't a serious military power on the world stage, or even the biggest power in its region (Israel and Iran would probably have been ahead of Iraq even at its peak, and the US, at least if it has a local base on time to build up, always had the ability to defeat Iraq without too much difficulty). That doesn't mean that Iraq wasn't dangerous, only that it wasn't a world shaking danger. Also Iraq didn't "do nothing", it supported terrorism against Israel. Saddam did allow Abbas and Abu Nidal to live in Baghdad- but both were secular Palestinian splinter groups off of Yasser Arafat's PLO. Still terrorists, you don't have to be a religious fanatic in order to be a terrorist. Also MKO, and many of the suicide bombers where religious fanatics. "The report, released this week says it found no "smoking gun" linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda." No "smoking gun", doesn't actually equal "no operational links", "no operational links" doesn't equal "no links at all", and "no links at all to Al Qaeda", doesn't equal "no links to Islamic radicals. That last point is particularly important. Even if the report had said something like "we have definitive absolute proof that Saddam's government had no ties with Al Qaeda", that would do nothing to show "no ties with or support for Islamic radicals".