In article ,
Charles Gray wrote:

On Tue, 16 Mar 2004 21:00:20 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:

In article ,
Charles Gray wrote:

Much of Europe including the spanish electorate is very leery of
"it turned out well" arguements for invasions. The U.S. sold it to
them, (or tried to) on the arguement of imminent threat, which didn't
appear to exist.

Actually, that's exactly the *opposite* of what was said. It was
repeated, time and again, that waiting until the threat was "imminent"
was a bad idea.

True-- I was unclear-- the whole idea of pre-empting imminent
threats was the one that brought some doubt from the Europeans. But
we did argue that Hussein was very close to having WMD's, and when
others contradicted us, we were in turns mocking and hostile...which
didn't play well when it turned out that they were *right*.

Too bad for Saddam and at least some of Iraq's military leadership...
*they* thought that WMDs were there and available.