[calculoso]

I haven't read your whole post (might later on this afternoon), but the problem I see with this is that many things can be read into what he's saying... and what you read in is entirely up to what you believe before reading it.

I have two examples:

"We couldn't account for all the weapons of mass destruction.# The inspectors that were in there had to assume that the weapons of mass destruction that were in his original inventory that we could not account for, might still be there.# So that was always a planning factor.# But when you look hard at that, these were artillery shells, rocket rounds, that he would have to be hiding somewhere that were getting old.# And if he had to bring them out and use them, think about this, he's got to move them to artillery positions, to battery positions, under total dominance of the air by the United States.# I sure as hell wouldn't have been ... want to be that battery commander that said tomorrow you're going to get five truckloads of chemical weapons to be stored in your area to shoot.# Not under the air power we brought down and the ability to interdict them.# And these were tactical capabilities."

You can read, as you did, that Saddam's threat of WMD wasn't there and that there wasn't any.

Or, you can read that he and his commanders would have absolutely stupid to have even tried it. They would have been sitting ducks and they would have felt the brunt of whatever WMD there was, not the Americans. If you follow this line or thinking, the WMD are still there waiting to be found, brought out, used, etc.

Again, neither one may be 100% right... but it is possible to legitimately read both situations into that quoted text depending on whatever bias you already have.

"We bombed him almost at will.# No one in the region felt threatened by Saddam.# No one in the region denied us our ability to conduct sanctions.# Many countries joined us in sanctions enforcement, in the no-fly zones, and in the maritime intercept operations where we attempted to intercept his oil and gas smuggling."

Does this mean that civilians in that area didn't feel threatened or does that mean only the troops didn't feel threatened? Saddam's power and threatening ability went far beyond his military might.

I get the feeling, from that paragraph, again without reading the rest of it, that he was saying that the US military did not feel threatened by the Iraqi military. They could do whatever they wanted. This does not say anything about the actual people and their fears of Saddam himself.