Nick wrote:
On Thu, 7 Apr 2005 22:40:04 -0700 (PDT), Gautam Mukunda wrote
... virtually no one thought that inspections were working _before_ the war.
No one? No one? What is your definition of "working" here? Certainly no one saw Saddam stepping down immediately and no one thought he was particularly cooperative, but are those the only measures that inspections are working?
In fact I'd argue that nobody outside of the circle of Bush supporters (and the people he had frightened into believing we could be nuked at any moment) believed that the inspections were _not_ productive.
Beyond that, I'd bet another Doug Nickle that Bush insiders had a good idea that if there were any WMDs in Iraq they were few and far between because they were directing the inspectors where to go and what to look for and apart from a few shells that had probably got lost in the bureaucratic shuffle, they couldn't find anything.
They also knew that the evidence for an Iraq nuclear program was specious; the infamous aluminum tubes were not suitable for a centrifuge and the yellow cake letter was a fraud.
But because they knew that there would be no support for the war unless we believed Iraq was a threat, they continued to delude and frighten the American people.
So why did we go to war? Read up on the Project for the New American Century, a think tank that was established in 1997 by many of the people that control our government today.
Here's a quote from their white paper written in 2000 (and available here
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf)
"In the Persian Gulf region, the presence of American forces, along with British and French units, has become a semipermanent fact of life. Though the immediate mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term
commitment of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital importance.
Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional
security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
-- Doug _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
