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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Sat. 09/27/03 03:02:38 PM
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Where Are Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction? Re: "Iraq: A Federal Judge's Point of View" A reader writes: Let me be a bit severe. That the judge changed his mind after visiting Iraq's torture centre is salutary but beside the point. Your country's administration committed a strategic mistake by emphasizing the weapons of mass destruction. I myself was always skeptical of the claims and said so before and after the war at my blog in several languages. I always argued that the administration overplayed its hand and should've simply argued that Saddam's non-compliance was prima facie a casus belli under the ceasefire agreement as ratified by subsequent UN resolutions. 6 months and the Coalition still hasn't found evidence that the WMD programmes continued after the Gulf war. No wonder the rest of the world is so deeply cynical and uncooperative in sending troops or money to rebuild Iraq. I supported the war insofar as it removed a threat but I was never impressed by the WMD argument and my skepticism appears for now to be vindicated. Actually, I have no cause to quarrel with that very much. But nobody disputes that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction: it was clear to the whole world that he had already used them. AFAIK, no intelligence organization on Earth had concluded that he had actually gotten rid of them all. AFAIK, even the United Nations took it as a given that he still had some. AFAIK, only the likes of Sean Penn denied that Saddam Hussein still had WMD: not an authority in my book. :-) So, where are they? What happened to them? I don't know. What I do know is this: if Sean Penn knew better than all the intelligence organizations on Earth, or told the truth when none of them did, then we have a really big problem other than terrorism. It does strike me, though, as odd that we are all trying to make sense of a situation in which the principal player for a decade or more was a madman. P.S. I saw on the news today that a large cache of weapons has just been found in Iraq, buried next to a river. If finding a store of weapons significant enough to make the news can happen nearly six months after the liberation of Baghdad, I think that any definite opinions about WMD in Iraq are premature. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Sat. 09/27/03 03:02:38 PM |
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