Posted on 04/28/2003 10:28:14 AM PDT by Shermy
Unnamed source. Heck, they don't even say an "unnamed source" said it.
Anyway, the Canadians seem very fast to say "non" at every stage of this investigation.
They would only know this (after his death) if the hotel room was infected. I wonder where he stayed in...Sao Paulo?
It makes perfect sense. Saddam refused Bush's exile deal before the war because he thought we were bluffing. He thought we wouldn't risk a WMD exchange in the end game. (Perhaps he also thought he could pull off a Stalingrad in Baghdad -- we don't know.) Bush decided we had no choice but to take that risk, given the magnitude of the provocation and the threat, so he upped the ante and went in -- but taking care to leave Saddam with something to play for all the way to the end (faux "decapitation strikes" notwithstanding). Don't forget, we had a back-channel through Putin for 18 months before the war and during the war -- a channel to communicate with Saddam, to confound him, perhaps, to keep him on the realistic, pragmatic plane (not that hard, I suspect, despite the public rhetoric), to feed us info on his psychological state, whether he was making backup plans in case his deterrent failed, etc. That was an enormously powerful tool for keeping this thing under control.
If you just conceptualize Saddam as a gangster -- a clever, ruthless, hedonistic thug -- then he really doesn't seem quite so scary, even with WMD. If you deal with him like that, and not like the reincarnation of Saladin or Nebuchnezzar, he's probably going to react on the same level. I recall being relieved when I realized it was Saddam who made the anthrax, not al-Qaeda, because I knew that meant that we were dealing with an opponent susceptible to rational calculation and normal human considerations of self-interest.
At one level, this war was a far more dangerous operation than most people understand -- fully comparable to the Cuban Missile crisis, at the very least. OTOH, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the most likely outcome was always that reason and self-interest would prevail.
Now, what about my idea that Bush would stall to give us a chance to build up biodefenses, so we could have gone in shielded against any doomsday retaliation? Well, there could be several reasons why Bush eschewed a further delay, but my own post mortem analysis is that any improvements we could make to our civil defenses in the next year or two would still leave the whole apparatus hopelessly leaky. If we waited a year, or two years, maybe Saddam couldn't take out New York or Washington, but he could still kill a million people in Manchester or Melbourne, and that's still not within the realm of "acceptable" losses. That's where my argument got real handy-wavy, and that's where it failed. If Saddam attacked us and a non-leaky defense against his WMD takes ten years to put in place, then what are our options: let 9/11 go unpunished, or risk a miltary showdown, offering Saddam only his own skin to play for? Well, I guess we know now what option Bush decided to go for.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.