re: #53 What, me worry?

Part of the problem maybe.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see it. Lil’ ole me read it in the links I gave you. David Kay, the head of weapons inspections at the time, said there was no way to verify what Sadaam had. He kept running them on wild goose chases. All of a sudden, by 2002-3, Kay was front and center going back on everything he previously stated.

Many years later, Kay confessed to lying about all of it in a Slate interview which I can’t seem to find now, but someone here at LGF pointed it out. I’ll keep looking.

We’ll never know for sure. My guess is that they undermined any conflicting information in an inherently ambiguous situation because of ideological blinders and arrogance born out of a sense that ambiguity=weakness.

The reason why I feel that way is that I find it hard to believe that they would justify the invasion on WMD if they actually believed that they didn’t exist. Of course, justifying the invasion on a nation-building rationale wouldn’t have netted sufficient public support - so I can’t rule out the argument that they knew the WMD intel was false. Like I said, there’s no way to know for sure. I just don’t think that Bush would have taken the political risk of basing the invasion on intel that would clearly be proven false in a relatively short period of time.