I'll give Clinton credit. He's not a stupid man. He's put his finger on the nub of the problem. All the rest of it--talk of urban warfare, the "Arab street," oil prices, Colin Powell, the Palistinian confict, and so on--is just blather to keep the proles distracted.
Questions:
Q: Along that line, Mr. Secretary, Vice President Cheney said last week that Iraq was once close to producing or obtaining nuclear weapons, and said that they're getting close again. What evidence does the U.S. have that Iraq, Saddam Hussein, may be getting close again to obtaining a nuclear weapon?Rumsfeld: Oh, I think I'll leave that for the coming days and weeks. I mean, we know the obvious. We know that they were a lot closer than any of the experts had estimated they would be with respect to a nuclear weapon, and that was discovered during the post- 1991 period by actually seeing what was there. To the extent inspectors have been out now for a number of years, we know that we don't know what's taken place during those period of years. To the extent that they have kept their nuclear scientists together and working on these efforts, one has to assume they have not been playing tiddly-winks, that they have been focusing on nuclear weapons. And so we know what we know.
We know that they have an enormous appetite, that they were very close, within a short period of time, to having a weapon. We know that our estimate had been that it was multiples of years compared to what it actually was; and therefore, we know we weren't very good at what we were supposedly doing -- that is to say, estimating that. And we also know that since the end of the Cold War, that the proliferation of these technologies has been pervasive. And we know that they have porous borders. And we know some other things, but those are the kinds of things that would come out if and when the president decides that he thinks it's appropriate.