Sen. John McCain has a great piece in the Washington Post that sets the issue of Iraq’s WMDs straight. As he puts it:
Critics today seem to imply that after seven years of elaborately deceiving the United Nations, Hussein precipitated the withdrawal of U.N. inspectors from his country in 1998, then decided to change course and disarmed himself over the next four years, but refused to provide any realistic proof that this disarmament occurred.
I am not convinced. Nor was chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, who recently catalogued Iraq’s failure to come clean on an array of weapons programs the United Nations believed were continuing. Nor were Congress and President Clinton, who advocated regime change in Iraq in 1998 — before the U.N. inspectors left.
That’s the issue. If Bush lied, so did Clinton, Congress, and everyone else who said that Iraq had not come clean about it’s weapons program. Moreover, it would be morally obtuse for anyone to suggest that Iraq would be better off under Hussein. As McCain writes:
Does anyone believe that the United States, the Iraqi people or the Arab world would be better off if Hussein were still in power, if 8-year-old children were still held in Iraqi prisons, if Hussein were still threatening his neighbors? Hussein alone was responsible for this war, and we need make no apologies for supporting the use of U.S. military force to rid the world of his murderous regime.
It is too early to declare final victory in Iraq. But we’re well past the point of knowing that our war to liberate Iraq was right and just. The discovery of mass graves filled with the bodies of murdered children should have convinced even the greatest skeptic. We made America more secure, liberated millions from a reign of terror and helped create the prospect for the establishment of the first Arab democracy. That should make Americans proud — and critics of the administration’s decision to go to war a little more circumspect.
McCain is so dead on with his comments about these “missing” WMDs. I wonder if his comments will be on the national news…..
Desert Fox, Northern Watch and Southern Watch have been forgotten, I see. The weapons aren’t there because we blew them up.
Why the fuck do you even have comments if you just ignore them, Jay? Your opinions can’t stand scrutiny?
Pardon me for actually having a life other than this site…
There’s no evidence to support that Desert Fox destroyed Saddam’s arsenal. We did attack certain sites, but it is highly unlikely that the airstrikes in 1998 would have eliminated everything.
If Iraq’s weapons had been destroyed in 1998, there would be no reason for Saddam Hussein to risk his position and his life by failing to disclose that he had no weapons. A consummate political survivor like Hussein would not put everything on the risk unless he either had weapons or absolutely believed he did.
The bombing continued through 2003.
Adding to your stunning psychological analysis of Saddam, you don’t know Saddam stopped co-operating when he became convinced the inspections were part of a plan to eliminate him, and that the sanctions would never be lifted anyways. Expecting him to co-operate in his own destruction is a little much to ask.
Back to blaming the Palestinians for not just dying quietly.
It’s possible, but there’s more evidence to suggest that Saddam believed that he could exert enough pressure through the UN and others to stop the war and eventually have the sanctions lifted.
Until documentary evidence of Saddam is found, however, any theories about his mental state are just theories.