Vince Brannigan wrote:
George William Herbert wrote:
Vince Brannigan wrote:
[....]
Knowing what we knew pre-war, the conclusion that he was
still hiding a WMD program was well supported and reasonable.
Not universally agreed with, but well supported and reasonable.
And at least largely wrong, as we now know.

ole busho gambled and lost. unfortuantely the lives that were
lost were not his campaign supporters.

You are failing to move beyond your own political prejudices.

It's perfectly reasonable to debate the point whether the
state of knowledge when the US went from vague threats to
escalating ultimatums justified a prompt war. That debate
was valid and quite fruitful, then and now.

It's not reasonable, at all, to debate whether the preponderance
of information available to the west indicated at least some
concealed program and at least some concealed information in
Iraq at that time. Nobody who has ever seriously looked at
that question, regardless of their opinions on the first
question, has ever come away with a coherent case to the
contrary of that conclusion.

You are conflating the two questions. Because you are
ideologically biased against the outcome of the first question.

I know you know you're doing it; unlike questions of law or
engineering where you clearly know that you're qualified to
answer (even if some judgement / opinion calls may be disagreed
with by other professionals), on this issue you have rarely
posted more than a one or two sentence ideological snap.

The question is whether you can rise above your preconception
on this question to study enough about it to be able to
speak with authority, as opposed to just blind raging
opinion as you do now.

Fortunately, education on this point is rather easy,
if somewhat tedious: The UNSCOM and UNMOVIC reports are all
online thanks to the UN. A few websites, a few books from
the library (Hamza's, Butler's... that's an acceptable
start at least) plus actually reading the whole UNSCOM/
UNMOVIC report history at least once usually is an adequate
first pass. Unfortunately typically over a week's work:
UNSCOM and UNMOVIC reports are voluminous, and they
reported at least once a quarter since 1991...

Also:
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Iraq/index.html
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Iraq/IraqRefs.html
http://www.cns.miis.edu/research/iraq/index.htm
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/index.html
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/deception.htm


-george william herbert