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.
Ping to a Republican-American Editorial.
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Well, well, well............ it's not news unless the MSM says so.
bump
Interesting... thanks for the ping FRiend. :o)
Interesting that this would appear in the NYT after the election. Just a coincidence, I'm sure...
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The rest of the world knew about this in 2004.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3872201.stm
A few of us knew it in 2003...
Marking
And meanwhile traitors within the administration AGAIN leak classified documents to undermine the war/rebuild effort.
Is it possible that Saddam had completed the atomic bomb and it was smuggled to Syria when the war started?
Hope I'm wrong but I think this refers to a poorly written sentence by a NYT reporter in an article several weeks old now. The reporter referred to a 2002 report that stated Iraq was very close to building a nuke in 1991 but the sentence was so poorly written folks assumed he meant the nuke was close to completion in 2002.
If this isn't the same report, apologies.
If this is true (and I've heard it before), then we invaded and deposed Saddam just in time.
ping
How long will the Treason Media get away with its cover-up. What did it know and when did it know it?
hmm... I wonder why the folks writign this editorial didn't check that?
I remember reading about the deliveries of centrifuge parts for the centrifuges Saddam would require to enrich uranium being halted at the Iraq-Turkey border back in 2002 or 2003.
Combine that with Saddam's business dealings with Niger to acquire unenriched uranium, and hopefully most of us can put 2 and 2 together.
How long will it be before the MSM puts this story on the tube via their innocuous 6:30 Evening "News" shows? If my guess is correct most of us who are alive today won't live long enough to see that happen.
If this editorial is referring to the mis-reported NYT article I think it is there were a lot of folks who made the same mistake this writer has made including some prominent radio talk show hosts.
Of course, I could be wrong and this may be another NYT article.
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