[CLUE-Talk] a new note in the usa/iraq tune

[Timothy C. Klein]

* G. Richard Raab (rraab at plusten.com) wrote:
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> On Saturday 24 January 2004 04:00 pm, bill ehlert wrote:
> > Powell: Possible Iraq Had No Banned Arms
> >
> > AP  44 minutes ago
> >
> > By GEORGE GEDDA, Associated Press Writer
> >
> > TBLISI, Georgia - Secretary of State Colin Powell
> > (news - web sites) held out the possibility
> > Saturday that prewar Iraq (news - web sites) may
> > not have possessed weapons of mass destruction.
> >
> > Powell was asked about comments last week by
> > David Kay, the outgoing leader of a U.S. weapons
> > search team in Iraq, that he did not believe Iraq
> > had large quantities of chemical or biological
> > weapons.
> 
> This surprises me somewhat. I will say though, that Iraq is a very large 
> place. While Nukes would be difficult to hide, Chemicals are easy, and 
> Biological are trivial in hiding. 

This is only partially true, to my mind.  Hiding modest stockpiles of
chemical or bio weapons *might* be easy -- hiding infrastructure to
produce said weapons would not be.  Not by a long shot.  We have
exhausted pretty much all the posibilties on serious bio- or
chem-weapons production facilties.  They didn't exist.  The nuclear
weapons productions facilities would be even harder to hide -- we have
found nothing.

Which is an important point -- it means Iraq had no chem-bio weapons
other than those that it had from before Gulf War I.  And they accounted
for a lot of those.  Some of them hade a very finite shelf-life as well.

It's up to you to decide if that changes anything about what we were
told in the run-up to war.  It does for me.

It is also damn-near impossible to write Kay off as a partisan hack
trying to make Bush look bad. The opposite was generally thought: that
he was appointed to make a case he had already decided upon -- that Iraq
had NBC.

Tim
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