Report Discounts Iraq Arms Threat: Inspector Says Hussein Lacked Means
In a report that will surprise absolutely no thinking person who has been paying attention, the US government is about to issue a report that finds that the threat of Iraqi WMDs were overstated. Really? (Next on Eyewitness News: Elton John announces that he’s gay….)
The government’s most definitive account of Iraq’s arms programs, to be released today, will show that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the United States invaded and did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, U.S. officials said yesterday.
The officials said that the 1,000-page report by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors or the West. President Bush has continued to assert in his campaign stump speech that Iraq had posed “a gathering threat.”
The officials said Duelfer, an experienced former United Nations weapons inspector, found that the state of Hussein’s weapons-development programs and knowledge base was less in 2003, when the war began, than it was in 1998, when international inspectors left Iraq….
A senior U.S. government official said that the report includes comments Hussein made to debriefers after his capture that bolster administration assertions, including his statement that his past possession of weapons of mass destruction “was one of the reasons he had survived so long.” He also maintained such weapons saved his regime by halting Iranian ground offensives during the Iran-Iraq war and deterred coalition forces from pressing on to Baghdad during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the official said.
I can almost hear the rebuttal being formulated deep in the bowels of GOP Spin Central: “Yes, but Saddam Hussein WANTED to have WMDs”….
Well, if wanting something is a crime, you might as well just go ahead and put the cuffs on me before you begin the strip search. I want to be a scratch golfer and be independently wealthy, but so far neither of those things are happening.
Making policy out of a belief that someone wants something is lousy policy. Absent the preponderance of clear and irrefutable evidence, one if left with no other conclusion to draw that that George W. Bush is an unreconstructed liar. He and his neocon cohorts wanted war against Iraq, and they were finally able to drum up something they felt they could use to justify taking resources away from the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. More than 1,000 American deaths later, Bush and his cronies have been exposed for the liars they are.
THIS is the leader we deserve? WAKE UP AND SMELL THE KITTY LITTER!! Is George W. Bush the best that we can do??
WE DESERVE BETTER.
