Reply #76: You see, if we had formed the International Coalition [View All]

[quaker bill]

The French and the Germans would have dropped their bombs more politely. That would have been much better.

Here is the conundrum:

We inspected Iraq from the end of Desert Storm until 1998. We stopped finding weapons and programs well before 1998. Our failure to find weapons lead to the conclusion that Saddam was very good at hiding them. We chose this answer over the more obvious and apparently correct conclusion that we had found and destroyed everything.

So we sent inspectors back in in 2002-2003. They found nothing. We again concluded that Saddam is just hiding things very well. We chose this answer over the more obvious and apparently correct conclusion that there was nothing to be found. More inspections would have yeilded the exact same result, no weapons. Anyone can be very good at hiding something that does not exist.

The only way out of the logical trap was for Saddam to surrender a weapons program he did not have. If Saddam was a strategic thinker, he would have made a weapons program up and surrendered it just to make us happy. But he wasn't, so instead, he just relied on telling the truth, this was never going to be good enough.

More inspections would never have halted the drive to war. As you can never inspect all possible hiding places at once, there would always have been the possibility that he was hiding them somewhere.

Senator Kerry's line on this is just as full of holes as Bush's. The only difference between the final result under the Kerry plan and that realized under the Bush plan would have been a few less dead American soldiers and a few more dead European soldiers with a few more partners to fund reconstruction. The number of wrongly dead Iraqi's would probably have been about the same either way.

Of course, there is the speculation that Saddam did not think we would launch an all out war without the international partners. So if we had taken the time to develop the coalition further, Saddam might have better prepared his defenses in the belief that we were actually coming. If true, this could have meant more dead on both sides, but we will never know. There were an awful lot of deadly conventional weapons in storage that Saddam never deployed. (massive anti-tank mines for instance)

Here is the problem:

There was copious evidence that Saddam had given up ambitions in regard to WMD in the 90's. None of it was ever deemed credible. Even in 1998 the CIA reported that the conclusion for the continued presence of weapons programs in Iraq was utter speculation with no factual evidence to back it up.

There was sufficient evidence to conclude that the threat no longer existed, were we so inclined. We were not. Further evidence would not have changed our conclusion.