[John Jorsett]

Even if Iraq did indeed destroy their weapons, then Saddam was monumentally stupid enough to act like he still had them. Good enough reason to take him out in my book. If I were a cop and some jerk pointed his finger in his coat pocket at me, I wouldn't be waiting around to see if he's bluffing.

[geedee]

. . . then Saddam was monumentally stupid enough to act like he still had them. Good enough reason to take him out in my book.

Damn good point. One we'll never see discussed much.

[piasa]

True- it wouldn't matter if Iraq had the stuff, it was still able to blackmail all the nations around it because of Iraq's known record of using chemical weapons, and because of all of its front groups and companies it had used to purchase items for its WMD programs. Not only was it able to influence the nations around it, it was able to host groups on its soil whose objectives were to overthrow other Arab governments, who wouldn't dare do anything about it because they were too afraid of Hussein.

To make things worse, even some factions in the governments of western nations, including ours, were ready to let Iraq have its way and cited Iraq's WMD capability as a reason to justify letting Hussein do what he wanted. It was "too risky," they said, to act against Hussein.

I'm still waiting for all those high tolerance, hideously expensive aluminum tubes to turn up as cheap disposable rockets. Blixie said they were for making rockets, not for centrifuges. Funny how we have not found all those "rockets" or at least the tubes.

The Iraqis had ordered and taken delivery of huge amounts of tubes, yet so far there's been no sign of them. (We only interecepted a fraction of those shipments by the time we got wind of what Iraq was doing.)

[twittle]

If I were a cop and some jerk pointed his finger in his coat pocket at me, I wouldn't be waiting around to see if he's bluffing.

Not the proper analogy. What if you were a cop and wanted to search someone's car for drugs. That person then told you that you had no right to search his car for drugs. Would you then arrest the person, take his car and forcibly conduct a search? What would your reaction be after no drugs were found?

[Zeroisanumber]

Even if Iraq did indeed destroy their weapons, then Saddam was monumentally stupid enough to act like he still had them.

Yes, and I'm sure that if we find no evidence of WMD's in Iraq we can use that line to win votes in 2004. /sarcasm