On Thu, 06 May 2004 23:38:39 -0700, Mark Hickey wrote:

wrote:

The professional intelligence groups were saying that they could not
verify that WMD actually existed and Cheney and company just could not
believe it, given Hussein's retoric. They didn't think it was possible
that he was nothing more than a sadistic blowhard. But it appears that
is in fact what he was.

The "professional intelligence groups" were pretty much unanimous in
stating that it was almost certain that Iraq had massive stores of WMD,
and certainly had the ability to produce lots more in short order. The UN
weapons inspection report just before the war concluded that it was nearly
certain they were sitting on 10,000 liters of viable anthrax, for example
(not that the 10 second snippets from Hans Blix would have led the average
news viewer to understand that).

I really, really hope you're right and that somehow his WMDs had gone
inert - though that wouldn't make a lot of sense given the known Iraqi
abilities in production of WMDs.

Mark Hickey

This WMD stuff really baffles me. If Saddam had WMD, and he knew the US
was coming to get them, did we really think he would just leave them to be
found? Shouldn't we have expected him to get them out of the country,
into unknown hands? Would we be safer with the WMD in Iraq, where we
could try to keep an eye on them, or in unknown hands? Is GWB
stupid enough to prefer having WMD in unknown hands to having them
contained in Irag? I doubt it.

And if the US really believed he had WMD, and then they weren't found,
shouldn't they have concluded that they had to have been spirited out of
the country, and shouldn't there have been a massive panic to find them?

Something doesn't add up somewhere.

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