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Iraq had WMDs after all
Waterbury Republican-American ^ | November 29, 2006 | Editorial

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.


TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs; War on Terror
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To: visualops

And meanwhile traitors within the administration AGAIN leak classified documents to undermine the war/rebuild effort.

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The NYT is going down in flames and wants to take America down with her. They should be prosecuted for their treasonous conduct during this war.


41 posted on 11/29/2006 3:20:36 PM PST by photodawg
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To: RaceBannon

Maybe Michelle Malkin from the Hartford Courant will pick this up?
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Michelle is not from the Courant, she is a nationally syndicated columnist.


42 posted on 11/29/2006 3:22:33 PM PST by photodawg
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To: photodawg
It's interesting to me that I have seen a number of conservatively written stories coming out of this Blue State publication in recent weeks

The Waterbury Republican-American in Waterbury, Connecticut is one of the most consistently conservative newspapers in the country and it's not a new thing, I've been posting their editorials for years.

43 posted on 11/29/2006 3:28:52 PM PST by Graybeard58 (Remember and pray for SSgt. Matt Maupin - MIA/POW- Iraq since 04/09/04)
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To: photodawg; nutmeg

you're right, I was thinking of Michelle JACKLYN, the columnist who slandered us from back in 2000!!

got me, thanks!


44 posted on 11/29/2006 4:35:23 PM PST by RaceBannon (Innocent until proven guilty: The Pendleton 8)
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To: freedomfiter2

sad but interesting point.


45 posted on 11/29/2006 4:36:09 PM PST by RaceBannon (Innocent until proven guilty: The Pendleton 8)
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To: massgopguy
So... no fissionable material, but "intelligence that states" that Iraq had three assemblies. Well that's a start, but even if we suppose that this intelligence is correct (and I haven't seen photos of these assemblies (and please don't list reasons why someone with such photos wouldn't want to show them to me, it proves exactly nothing)), that doesn't put Iraq "on the verge". I possess some laboratory glassware, lacking only a few kilograms of smallpox to have a functioning biowarfare arsenal, but that doesn't put me "on the verge".
46 posted on 11/30/2006 12:17:02 PM PST by xenophiles
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To: Graybeard58; melancholy
If only they'd report on something we did not already know!!

:-)

Nancee

47 posted on 11/30/2006 12:18:42 PM PST by Nancee ((Nancee Lynn Cheney))
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