Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to 'The buck stops here'--period.

Unintended consequences
Larry J — (archived)

Harry Truman is famous for the sign on his desk, "The Buck Stops Here." He was also caught by surprise when the Soviets barricaded Berlin in the late 1940s (leading to the Berlin Airlift), exploded their first nuclear weapon in 1949 and when the North Koreans invaded the South in 1950. Intel has its limits. Do historians blame Truman for any of those cases when Intel got it wrong?

There was a period of about 5 years when there were no UN inspections in Iraq. That left Saddam a lot of time to do stuff. If, and this is a big if, he sent WMD materials out of Iraq, he could've done that any time during those years. At the moment this is all supposition. We don't know if he sent the materials out of Iraq, nor when or why he might have done so. Until we know more, it isn't reasonable to blame Bush for unintended consequences.

We do know that Saddam sent money to the families of suicide bombers in Israel, so he did support terrorism. The Czech government claims that one of Saddam's agents met with Mohammad Atta in April of 2001. The CIA has never put any credance in that report, but the agent mentioned in the story was arrested a couple weeks ago. Perhaps we will know more soon.

To those like Raoul who keep saying that Saddam and Osama bin Laden were polar opposites and would've never cooperated, I point out the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. If ever there were two men (monsters) who didn't get along, it was Hitler and Stalin. Still, they managed to look past their differences long enough to sign a non-aggression pact in 1939 that held up until Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Expediency has a way of trumping major idealogical differences, at least until one side decides to stab the other in the back. This little piece of history doesn't prove that the Saddam and Osama were cooperating but it does show that such cooperation is within the realm of the possible.

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