Post originally by Zoran Bekric at 2003-05-18 19:38:52
Converted from Phorums BB System



David Sinclair wrote:
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<i>Yes, personal views. Regardless the lack of independant verification of any evidence collected up to this point, anyone who thinks the Hussein regime ever had any intention of diarming its weapons of mass destruction is being unrealistic and downright foolish.</i>
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You are quite right. If I'd said any of that it would indeed have been a personal view. Trouble is, I didn't. I just pointed out a rather spectacular discrepancy between claims and evidence.

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<i>Is it really your opinion that having relatively unrestricted access to anywhere within Iraq for a period of barely a full month is sufficient to find anything that was intentionally hidden, given all the additional factors like infrastructure repairs, lawlessness, and the theft of billions of dollars worth of art and artifacts?</i>
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It's my opinion that if someone claims to have intelligence of such weapons so strong and certain that it's enough to justify an immediate war, then, yes, that intelligence should be able to lead them straight to those weapons well within a month of unrestricted access. Actually, I would have expected irrefutable evidence to have surfaced during the war when such weapons were actually used.

If the intelligence isn't strong and certain enough to allow finding such weapons within a month of unrestricted access, then it wasn't strong or certain enough to justify going to war.

As it is, each day that passes makes the initial claims look more and more dubious.

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<i>Admittedly, at this point, they could be anywhere in the world let alone anywhere in Iraq and there isn't much more than the word of doctors and a little documentation to prove they existed, but why assume the doctors lied about the theft?</i>
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Actually I think the documentation is the best evidence so far. If those doing the searching actually expected to find anything, I believe they would have been very careful to secure all the various Iraqi government ministries as soon as possible. That way forensic accountants and the like would be going through all the records of the former regime even now, looking for the "paper trail" of those weapons no matter how it was disguised. After all, the project to hide the weapons could have been hidden under the label "Saladin Memorial Fruit Tree Irrigation Project" at the Ministry of Agriculture or some such. Sure, going through all those records would have been time-consuming, but run in parallel with searches on the ground, it would have had a much better chance of finding any such weapons.

The fact is, though, the searchers did no such thing. Didn't secure the ministries at all. Let arsonists burn them and any paper trail they may have contained even after they had secured Bagdad. This suggests to me that the searchers are either incompetent or that they didn't expect to find anything and so didn't waste resources in even trying to present the appearance that they were looking. I don't believe they are incompetent.

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<i>At best, I would say your views are sorely premature. Maybe six months down the road, I might agree with your views, but not yet.</i>
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Fair enough. Obviously I disagree, but I can see that as a valid point of view.

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<i>Thank you for the entertaining disagreement,</i>
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Thank you for the civil response.

If you had written something like "including the chemical and biological weapons Iraq was alleged to have had in the recent war" there wouldn't be any disagreement, since it is indisputable that Iraq was indeed alleged to have such weapons. A minor point, but God is in the details.

I should also point out that, overall, I enjoyed the two reviews of <i>Big Bang.</i> Thank you for doing them.

Regards,

Zoran