Current Events — HabitableZone

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Re: Easy
Tom Brosz — (archived)

<Iraq was a paranoid stalinist-like state. Suppose someone did this to Stalinist Russia... How do you think they would have reacted?

Good point. South Africa's nuclear disarmament, done with South Africa's full cooperation (the differences in how inspectors were treated are like night and day compared to Iraq), went with nary a hitch, and their socialist regime (though not a totalitarian one) is still in power. Too bad for Saddam.

And I think he thought that as long as everyone believed he still had WMD, nobody would invade.

You might have hit on something there. In retrospect, not his brightest move. Pretending to be a deadly threat to the region wasn't going to get us to back off. Maybe the overblown WMD threat was aimed more at locals? Like Iran? I'm not prepared to discard the theory that his underlings made him think he had more in his arsenal than he really did.

Many possibilities, little evidence to nail any of them down. But note that most of them do not require Bush to be a liar. At worst, it would mean our intelligence had been duped, which is not great either.

Given the huge amount of WMD defensive materials found in Iraq (injectors, protective suits, etc.), if Saddam had no WMD, he sure as hell thought we were going to use them.

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