Presidential Debate

[kandrathe]

Absolutely, especially if, only a few months before, you had miracuously known the exact OPPOSITE to be true:

24 Feb 2001 In Cairo, Secretary of State Colin Powell declares: "He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. [source: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/933.htm]"

It's not exactly coming from some leftist acivist, right? The bloody secretary of state KNEW - half a year before 9/11 - that Iraq had NO WMD and posed no military threat to it's neighbors - let alone the US.

My opinion has not changed on that either. It was the weakest evidence and reason to attack Saddam. The best and clearest reason was his failure to abide the armistice he signed in 1991.

Also:The Bush Administration's top weapons inspector David Kay "resigned his post in January, saying he did not believe banned stockpiles existed before the invasion" and has urged the Bush Administration to "come clean" about misleading America about the WMD threat. [Source: Chicago Tribune, 3/24/04; UK Guardian, 3/3/04]

Just FYI: David Kay is neither French, nor German or from some other cowardly "old Europe" nation  :P

Ah, media spin. From the Scotsmen: David Kay: Blair and Bush 'Should Have Realised Pre-War Truth on Wmd' Again, I wasn't sure based on what Iraq was not doing, but I didn't think their WMD capabilities were a threat if they stayed in Iraq.

Come on, this is so BLATANTLY obvious...
Uh-huh...
Like, for instance, making clear that Saddam's Baath party was a secular militarily oriented regime (once actually a socialist party) that SUPPRESSED religious fundamentalists in Iraq everywhere? That actually KILLED islamistic avtivists in Iraq by the hundreds? That was hated and despised by the Shiite clergy in Iran and the Shiite population in Iraq? That had NO common ground whatsoever with Al Quaeda and other islamistic terror organisations but a common hatred of America and the West?

Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Lee Hamilton blasted the mainstream press yesterday for distorting the Commission's findings on links between Iraq and al Qaida before the Sept. 11 attacks, saying those findings actually support Bush administration contentions.  "The sharp differences that the press has drawn [between the White House and the Commission] are not that apparent to me," Hamilton told the Associated Press, a day after insisting that his probe uncovered "all kinds" of connections between Osama bin Laden's terror network and Iraq.

And, also rarely mentioned, the fact that Saddam was mainly mad at his former ally, the US, for first diplomatically greenlighting his Kuwait adventure and then, at the demand of their more important Saudi allies, turning coat and starting the first Gulf war...
Should that be made clearer?
And, conveniently, ignore the fact that it was the US and it's allies that, once again, had created the toilet in the first place. That Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had funded Saddam's war against Iran while Iran was still the great devil, that American military advisors had supported Iraqi troops, that the US even provided help in acquiring weapons and military intelligence (even satellite imagery) to aid Saddam's war effort. And that the technology for Saddams WMD he actually - back then in the 1980's - used against Iranian troops (and later the Kurd minority in his own country) had been developed with American aid.
But the audience in the US gasped in shock when Oprah showed the picture of a certain Mr. Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein... come on, this has been common knowledge.
And that's what the world is afraid of...

Well, at least *I* can breathe in relief. Concindentially, the second largest untapped reserve of crude oil in the world is under Iraq, not under the Black Forest where I live  ;)

Well, if we are all coming clean then... Who sold Iraq the chemicals and supplied him with much of his nuclear and missile capabilities? There is enough mud for all of us.