Angus McAwesome wrote:Sweet Zombie Jesus... The Free Republic? They're about as unbiased a source as Fox News.
Actually, it originally appeared
here, Slate is owned by the Washinton Post. Christopher Hitchens doesn't work or write for The Free Republic. I linked to Free Republic because it came up on my Google.
The question then, becomes this: Should the date or timing of this unpostponable confrontation have been left to Saddam Hussein to pick?
Every time some Republitard drags this broke down horse out....
I am not a Republican, but I do stand by my position--despite the trendy, yet tired old song that Saddam was no threat to the U.S.
I've realized that usually people who watch MTV and have a very limited understanding of world history usually say this.
...I like to ask them exactly how and with what Saddam's Iraq would have been able to confront us.
Hitchens wrote: Here, it is simply astonishing how many people remain willing to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt
It's not all about catching Saddam with his finger on the button, unfortunately. There is some history to consider -- much more history than what is found in
Loose Change.
He had no navy to speak of, his remaining air force was a pathetic joke, and his longest ranged ballistic missile system was barely able to hit targets in Israel, much less threaten the continental United States. So once again, where was the threat?
Saddam's regime made it impossible to conduct serious inspections, first of all. Second,
the Kay inquiry has already revealed compelling evidence indicating "a complex concealment program, of the designing of missiles well beyond the permitted legal range, of the intimidation of scientists and witnesses, and of the incubation of deadly biological toxins."
"The Baathists declared a very impressive stockpile of weapons as late as 1999 and never cared to inform the U.N inspectorate what they had done with it."
"I am pleased to notice the disappearance from the peacenik argument of one line of attack—namely that Saddam Hussein was "too secular" to have anything to do with jihad forces. The alliance between his murderous fedayeen and the jihadists is now visible to all—perhaps there are some who are still ready to believe that this connection only began this year. Meanwhile, an increasing weight of disclosure shows that the Iraqi Mukhabarat both sought and achieved contact with the Bin Laden forces in the 1990s and subsequently.
Again, was one to watch this happening and hope that it remained relatively low-level?"
Much more salient is the story of Saddam's dealings with Kim Jong-il. You may remember the secret and disguised shipload of North Korean Scuds, intercepted on its way to Yemen by the Spanish navy just before war began... "
"there are reams of verifiable contact between al-Qaida and Baghdad. Bin Laden supported Saddam, and his supporters still do, and where do you think this lovely friendship was going?"
"Even more interesting is the fashion in which the deal broke down. Having paid
some $10 million dollars to North Korea, the Iraqi side found that foot-dragging was going on—this is the discussion revealed on one of the hard drives—and sought a meeting about where the money might be refunded. North Korea's explanation for its slipped deadline was that things were getting a little ticklish.
In the month before the coalition intervened in Iraq, Saddam's envoys came back empty-handed from a meeting in Damascus. It doesn't take a rocket scientist (just for once I can use this expression without toppling into cliché) to deduce that the presence of a large force all along Iraq's borders might have had something to do with North Korea's cold feet."
Finally:
"So the "drumbeat" scared off the deal-makers, and Saddam Hussein never did get Rodong missiles, which might have been able to hit targets far away from Iraq. Elsewhere in the Kay report, there is convincing evidence that Iraqi scientists were working on missiles, and missile fuels, with ranges longer than those permitted by the United Nations. So there is an explanation for why the completed and readied material was never "found" by inspectors before or after the invasion: It hadn't been acquired quite yet. Which meant that Saddam could not confront the international community in the way that North Korea has lately been doing, by brandishing weapons that do in fact have deterrent power. As in previous cases—the parts of a nuclear centrifuge found in the yard of Iraqi scientist Mehdi Obeidi, for example—the man in charge of these covert weapons programs was Saddam's son Qusai. I find I can live with the idea that Qusai never got to succeed his father as Kim Jong-il did. Imagine a North Korea, with attitude, on the sea lanes of the Persian Gulf—and with "deniable" but undeniable ties to al-Qaida.
That was in our future if action had not been taken."