Posted on 11/29/2006 9:10:21 AM PST by Graybeard58
Buried in a front-page, Bush-bashing tome in The New York Times recently was this: "Experts say that at that time, (Saddam) Hussein's scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away."
"That time" was 2002. So if the experts are right, Iraq could have joined the atomic club in 2003.
That was the year President Bush and Congress decided the Hussein regime posed intolerable risk to world security and authorized an invasion by a U.S.-led coalition. Hussein was deposed and an uneasy, violent transitional period, demonstrably too long for American attention spans (see Nov. 7 election results), ensued.
That the Times hid this nugget 13 paragraphs into a 37-paragraph article is instructive. What the Times found important was the Bush administration placed 15-year-old technical nuclear information, written in Arabic, on a government Web site available to anyone. The liberal newspaper de-emphasized the near certainty that Iraq would be a nuclear entity today if the war the left insists never should have been fought had, in fact, never been fought.
It's true invading troops found no weapons of mass destruction, aside from a few Iran-Iraq war artifacts presumably left on various battlefields and in concealed ammunition dumps forgotten by the Hussein regime. But Iraq had built and used WMDs before, and captured documents prove the existence of a conspiracy to build such weapons.
It all comes down to time, opportunity and motive. Hussein's Iraq knew how to build nukes, as well as chemical and biological weapons, in 2002. If there had been no war, Iraq would have had the time and the opportunity to build and deploy them. And there was plenty of motive: a suspicious and unfriendly West; a deadly rival to the east, Iran; and a nuclear Israel that had used an airstrike to smash an earlier attempt by Iraq to join the atomic club.
And what might the United States have done about Iraq's nuclear ambitions in 2003 or 2004, with Hussein still in power? It would have had two choices: Negotiate from a position of relative weakness; or wait for something terrible to happen and respond in kind. One need not stretch the imagination far to conclude the Iraq war, for all its horrors and frustrations, is better than the unspeakable alternative.
One national security think tank believed that Saddam had outsourced his nuclear program, sending money and technicians to Libya, since Iraq had been crawling with UN inspectors. Of course, Libya gave up their nuclear program, which means that what they were abandoning was their cooperation in Saddam's program. And with Saddam deposed, the program couldn't go on any longer anyway.
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The information contradicting the "conventional wisdom" of the MSM on Saddam's WMD is out there for anyone to see, but it takes some effort to put the entire picture together. I blame the Administration for doing a horrible job in presenting the full picture of Saddam's WMD program circa 2002 to the American people. When the Iraq Survey Group concluded that there were no stockpiles of WMDs, hence no evidence of an ongoing program, the Administration shrugged its collective shoulders and said, essentially, "Opps."
It is sickening.
Their post-invasion public relations has been pathetic. It's sad that we've reached the point we are at today.
Sept 1998: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Sen McCain: "Mr Ritter, is it true that UNSCOM has intelligence that states Iraq has three Nuclear Weapons Assemblies but lacks only the fissile material to make them operative?"
Scott Ritter: "Yes".
Now all you have to do is prove it to the new legislature's satisfaction.
Maybe Michelle Malkin from the Hartford Courant will pick this up?
Or Mary McCrory?
How About Colin Macinroe from WTIC-AM??
Surely Diane Smith from Positively Connecticut will speak of this with Ray Dunaway??
...(groan)....
In 2004, I started collecting public reports, readily available on the Internet, verifying the existence of Saddam's WMD program. I'd collected numerous bits of information, but largely gave up the project because I'd come to the conclusion -- why should I knock myself out trying to defend the Administration's original intention in invading Iraq to take-out Saddam's WMD capability, when the Administration wasn't bothering to defend itself? It is sickening, and it is the greatest mystery in this whole Iraq operation.
Very interesting.
Many of us are aware of the dozens, if not hundreds, of reports from the major media throughout the 90s specifying the danger Saddam posed. It was hysterical about the prospect of al queda linking up with Saddam. It revealed his Salman Pak terrorist training center complete with airliner for practice. Clinton bombed Iraq in 98 claiming he was hitting Saddam's NBC factories and sites. Cohen and Dick Clarke claimed the Sudanese pharmacuetical plant was part of Saddam's weapons system.
Since Bush decided to actually DO something about it all has disappeared down the Memory Hole. But WE still remember.
They also had chem and bio weapons. But no one in the MSM wants to talk about it.
Precisely. This is why I consider the left in this country *evil* -- they conveniently forget what was considered solid evidence during the Clinton era, simply for the sake of gaining some political advantage over a Republican President. But, again, the real fault lies with the Administration which went to war to deny Saddam, and ultimately al Qaeda, access to WMDs, and then has done nothing to back-up its original claims, and has done nothing to refute the constant drumbeat for the last three years on the left that "Bush lied, people died."
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why should I knock myself out trying to defend the Administration's original intention in invading Iraq to take-out Saddam's WMD capability, when the Administration wasn't bothering to defend itself? It is sickening, and it is the greatest mystery in this whole Iraq operation.
It's almost as if the Bush administration has been working for the Dems.
Bush: Not a bad President at all, but an incompetent communicator who has done a great deal of harm to his party, and has absolutely sacrificed many of those who still wish him well.
We still wish him well because it's best for our country, but he surely doesn't make it easy... or pleasant.
One begins to wonder.
Too late.
And besides, this administration has no desire to fight this issue.
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