Halbert's Cubicle

Greetings technocrats.

Here's the part of things where I share what's on my mind with y'all. Let's get controversial.

Lately, I've been hearing a lot of people spewing off about how President Bush is such a liar. This is a very interesting claim. Sometimes it's in regards to the weapons of mass destruction, other times it's in regards to that nasty little CIA note about African Uranium. Let's look at both of those.

So, Bush is a liar because no weapons of mass destruction have been found. To that I say "yet." Besides, let's think of it another way. We've had people with far more credentials than President Bush talking about all of the nasty weapons that were sitting around in Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War. Now, enter George W. Bush. Since nearly the day he entered office, he has made a point of keeping the pressure on Iraq. As soon as things calmed down in Afghanistan, the issue came up in the UN security council about making Saddam come to terms with his crimes. That started quite a while before U.S. troops entered Iraq. In fact, there were several months of debate in this country, Bush flying around the world trying to drum up support for military action, and ultimatums against Saddam (which is rather sad for those poor folk who accused Bush of "rushing" to war, eh?). Now, by this time, Saddam has pretty much known a U.S. led invasion was coming for a good long while. Again, we've had people who should know, and had seen the evidence first hand, telling us for years that Saddam has very bad weapons. He made no serious attempts to deny that. At this point, as I see it, he would have two choices: Use his weapons against the invading forces; or hide them, and make his rival look foolish. Why he chose not to do the first, I couldn't say (for that matter, I guess I can't really prove he didn't use them on our troops). But a recently translated document from Iraqi secret services showed that Saddam, in case of a successful invasion, wanted his closest troops to loot, pillage, and destroy the infrastructure and people to make things difficult and embarrassing for the invaders. Saddam had years to hide or pass off his weapons. He obviously wanted trouble to follow his opponents long after he would leave power. Would it be unreasonable to think that maybe Saddam hid the weapons some place we haven't found them yet? Gave them to terrorists who had already left the country? Given them to another country in exchange for sanctuary?

I don't think so.

Next, the whole Uranium thing. First, Tony Blair made it clear that he stood behind claims that his own intelligence agencies had been finding clues of this. Besides that, in the past, Saddam had been shown to be attempting to acquire Uranium from African nations. Israel had to destroy the Osirak nuclear reactor to keep Iraq from attaining weapons grade radioactive material (experts agreed afterwards that if it hadn't happened, Iraq could have been a nuclear power within 3 years, and that was something like 5 or 7 years ago). So, Bush lied? That is a bit of a zealous overstatement. Going much further than the facts of the situation allow, I'd say.

But then again, what do I know? I'm just a conservative observer of all this.

Hal