On Dec 14, 2004, at 12:34 PM, Nick Arnett wrote:
I took my time making up my mind.
Tue Jul 29 23:34:29 PDT 2003
[...]
Bush's mention of the possibility of Iraq with nuclear weapons
touched a nerve. The idea of those nightmares arising again was one of the
things that brought me to reluctantly support the war, and by no means a
minor reason. Raising the specter of nuclear terrorism certainly was
effective, which makes the omission of the rest of the story all that more
egregious.
I remember that being put forth as a possibility at first, but it struck me as being unlikely since uranium enrichment is *very* hard to hide and since testing is required -- you can't just build a bomb out of nothing; you've got to experiment. To me the only way Iraq could have nukes at that time was black market purchase. And then they wouldn't have that many. (I know, one's too many in a lot of cases, but there are some countries that have thousands.)
I was more concerned, personally, with chem/bio and radiological weapons. Dirty bombs would be pretty vicious. Nukes not so much because apart from Scuds -- which I've always thought of as late-model V-1s -- I don't think Iraq had much of a delivery platform.
Of course they could have done a lot of damage in the local region, which is not famous for its rational responses to tribal threats, but that didn't worry me too much either because, cynically, it's as easy to drill for oil through fused radioactive glass as it is through sand.
In balance I'm a lot more worried about Pakistan's nuke threat. North Korea's a point of concern as well, as is Iran, but hey, arresting Saddam has made the world safer, right?
When manipulation of intelligence can make its way into the State of the
Union, it is very hard to imagine that it isn't being manipulated in many
other areas, too.
It's especially galling when the faulty intelligence gets re-elected. ;) Of course we didn't know that would happen back in 6/03.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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