"How would you know the inspections and sanctions worked?"
And how would you know they didn't? Because the Bush administration said so? The inspectors said that they needed more time, so they obviously thought they were making headway. The proof has been in the pudding all along as things turned out. No weapons have been found and the belief that Hussein had the capablility to manufacture his own weapons was greatly exaggerated.
"He never complied fully. There was no open transparency. There were no independent interviews with Iraqi scientists and their families in an outside country as required by UN mandate, as one example."
No country fully complies. They follow the leadership of the super powers and when the SALT inspections were being done it was always a game of cat and mouse. If anyone is looking for a culprit to blame for this mess it is America and the Soviets. They showed the world how the inspection game was played and countries have followed suit.
"Vladimir Putin told Bush directly that Saddam had WMD and would use them. The President of Egypt and the King of Jordan told General Tommy Franks Saddam had WMD and would use them. Saddam built a false image that killed him in the end."
This is so much BS its not even funny. It flies in the face of common sense. If all of these nations were so afraid of Hussein and his stock piles of WMDs they would have agreed to the proposal the US put to the UN. The fact that they didn't speaks volumes. There are more sources that say Hussein was a paper tiger and had no stock piles of weapons than there are that say he did. The US intelligence community said there weren't any, but that didn't stop the government from jumping to a bad conclusion because of the word of one source (Chalabi). The fact that they fabricated a gran illusion to try and pursuade the rest of the world again speaks volumes. They were looking for an excuse to invade Iraq and tried to start an avalanche with a snowflake.
"We can see now there was no "gathering threat" but there was no corroboration there wasn't either, which appeared to be a goal of Saddam."
So don't you do a little more research when there is no conclusive proof? Especially when you're talking about billions of dollars and thousands of lives? Or maybe you really don't care about that and are only in it for the money? Maybe this has been the root cause of this. It appears that we are down to two reasonable explanations, as all others are falling by the wayside in droves. It's either the US is looking for a large base to work from in the region, or they are in for the money. Do they really need a series of bases to keep the peace in the region like Iraq affords? Probably not. How about the other angle? Who is doing really really well because of this conflict? What is the price of crude again? Seems more logical and inline with the character shown by the Bush administration than the idea of them wanting to create "harmony" in the region.
I know, this is all just another conspiracy theory that I'm clinging to, right Cow? Makes no sense at all. Remember to mull that over the next time you fill up your Durango.
