Yale prof confirms what all should have known: Bush did not lie about WMD. (middle east, Israeli)
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A good op-ed by a Yale prof who also does a column for Bloomberg News. He confirms what any reasonably intelligent person not suffering from a derangement syndrome should already know: there were no "lies about WMD" from the Bush admin. He cites a book by Brit journalist Gordon Corera for his evidence:
As I have posted before, even Saddam's own senior officers believed it. It was all a consequence of Saddam's 'deterrence by doubt' strategy which was mainly intended to cow the Iranians. Saddam confirmed this in interrogations after being captured.
I believe that the "Bush lied, thousands died" meme will be remembered by historians as one of the biggest idiocies of US politics ever. Maybe even more worrisome that the meme itself was the fact that it was so widely embraced by so many Americans. There is doubtlessl a large percentage of the population, maybe even a majority, who still believe it. If a large number of people in a democratically-run nation can be persuaded of a stupid and easily disproven proposition, that nation is in trouble.
So, all Dubya has to do now to show the world he didn't lie is to produce those WMDs.
He said he saw Iraq moving illicit weapons to Syria. No one has proven that to be false. And plenty of people are getting nervous about Syria's stockpile of chemical and biological WMDs.
Do chemical weapons that Saddam used to kill Kurds count as a WMD?
P.S. I agree with your general premise that we shouldn't have went in to Iraq.
First, Donald Rumsfeld negotiated the deal to provide chemical weapons to Iraq.
Second, that was 1982. You aren't suggesting that we invaded Iraq in 2003 because he gassed Kurds in 1982, do you? By 2003, those chemical weapons were expired.
Third, in order to invade, the Bush Admin ordered the UN weapons inspectors out, who were looking for that WMD.
But what are we talking about? Some professor writes an op-ed and we accept it as gospel? Other people, like Joe Wilson, wrote op-eds too about the false statements Bush made in his state of the Union address about nuclear material.
As far as I can tell, the Syria question is a moot point. Suppose we were to get access to Syria now and found some stockpiles of WMD. It is unlikely that they would have "made in Iraq" labels on them, and even if they did, how would we know whether the labels were accurate?
We'll probably never know for sure what happened. It's even possible that Saddam himself somehow lost control/access to his WMD. Early in 2003 Saddam issued a cryptic instruction to "hold the coalition for eight days and leave the rest to him [Saddam]." (from Cobra II, p 190) This was immediately interpreted by his officers as meaning that WMD would be unleashed. But of course that never happened. It's tough to figure what else the order might have meant. Maybe Saddam did have something planned but was unable to make it happen.
Of course they wouldnt have "made in iraq" on them... But saddam put his picture on everything so if theres a chemical warhead in syria that has his ugly mug on it came from iraq!
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So Bush convinced one professor
