Will we discover Iraqi WMDs in Syria, I really wonder. I really can't shake the feeling it's downright strange Saddam didn't use them as a bargaining tool to gain asylum in another country.
Well, the cold and hard fact is, getting rid of Saddam was a perfectly valid political objective, WMDs or no WMDs. The hard part now is to organize some solid Iraqi power so as to not wake up in a few months and discover Al-Sadr or any other local tinpot dictator has established himself as a new Saddam.
Of course, where the WMDs went will be a mystery. My point is that there were too many different INTEL agencies---all of which did not rely on the same sources, and some of which (Israel and Iran) completely at odds with each other---all saying the same thing. Lincoln said you can't fool all the people all the time . . . so the WMDs were there.
Actually, the hard part is showing the peoples of the Muddle East exactly what representative government means. They, by and large, have no real clue. They are a people who have more or less willingly been subjugated to a variety of dictatorial thugs of one stripe or another for thousands of years - to the point where many of them view democracy as "the right to vote for whom we've been told to vote." In a theocracy such as the repressed Shiites first proposed under Al Sistani, Sistani would issue an edict telling his followers for whom to vote - and then they would be "free" to do just that - vote for whom they'd been told to vote. Only with the fledgling local elections that have been taking place unreported by the Media, can these people begin to understand what a representative government is all about.
That's because the two major forms of government in the ME are primarily either tyranny or lawless anarchy. The Arab doesn't easily fall into the middle ground.
Michael