Originally posted by Holden McGroin
Can anyone link to a statement by anyone in the run-up to the Iraq invasion who said "Iraq does not have WMD".
Seems to me that those who argued against invasion argued for continuing inspection regimin.
So when we came up empty just who was right and what were they right about?
Not quite what you're looking for but close.....
"The study, a quarterly report on Iraq from U.N. inspectors, notes that the U.S. teams' inability to find any weapons after the war mirrors the experience of U.N. inspectors who searched there from November 2002 until March 2003.
Many Bush administration officials were harshly critical of the U.N. inspection efforts in the months before the war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in August 2002 that inspections "will be a sham."
The Bush administration also pointedly declined U.N. offers to help in the postwar weapons hunt, preferring instead to use U.S. inspectors and specialists from other coalition countries such as Britain and Australia.
But U.N. reports submitted to the Security Council before the war by Hans Blix, former chief U.N. arms inspector, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency, have been largely validated by U.S. weapons teams. The common findings:
Iraq's nuclear weapons program was dormant."
From this article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-03-02-un-wmd_x.htmI've never heard of this source before, but a couple of points in this article are ironic
Link:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7049.htmIrony #1:
"With their report last week, the inspectors appointed by the Bush administration to search Iraq for weapons of mass destruction have had to acknowledge that the reality on the ground was totally different from the virtual reality that had been spun.
Both Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, and David Kay, his predecessor, were hawks who favoured the Iraq war. But while they try to give the administration some straws to cling to, they are professionals. After inspecting many sites, examining the voluminous documentation that has become available and interviewing many individuals, including Saddam Hussein and others in detention, they admit that the spin, to which they themselves had gladly contributed, was wrong"
Irony #2
"Like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Duelfer's group sees not a trace of revival of a nuclear programme. On the contrary, he says Iraq was further away from a nuclear weapon in 2003 than it was in 1991. It had not used the period between 1999 and 2002, when there were no inspections, for any revival. Thus, while George Bush has been maintaining that Saddam was a "growing threat" he was a diminishing danger to his neighbours and the world."
Irony #3
"Bush has been stressing that Saddam hated the US. However, Duelfer says that Saddam's interest in WMD seems to have been driven by concerns about Iran and Israel."
