Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
Hans Blix was there, and he didn't find them. He looked in the places our intel said to look, and they weren't there. We all know there were WMD in Iraq years ago, but shit happens. We staged airstrikes in the Clinton Administration (Operation Desert Fox -- look it up) to try to destroy them. We had sanctions. And so on. Our leaders were making categorical statements, but the intel people weren't -- they were hedging their bets because they didn't know. And Blix and his people were there looking, and they couldn't find them.
|
There was enough of a world-wide belief that they were there, coupled with what you call hedging - i.e., "well, maybe yes, and maybe no" - from our intel, and Hans & Co. weren't finding them, but weren't saying NONE, and at that point, the choice was wait around and maybe find out the hard way.
Bush decided that waiting for a boom or a cough wasn't a good option. I still agree with that, given all of the above, given that he might well have been lining up a new customer whose airplanes had already been effective, given that SH was disrupting much of the chance to stabilize the ME, financing terrorism, hiding terrorists, and continually killing his own people. Granted, the french were still making a profit off of him . . .
