On 4/12/2015 8:46 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
..
In 1998, there was still reason to believe he had them. We had almost
no information to the effect that Saddam actually destroyed his
weapons. By 2004, we had info from Blix's team, which should have been
enough to give us pause.

A bit too late to pause in 2004, we had already returned to Iraq.


Bush inherited the same secret intelligence, which supported the false
testimony from Iraqi defector Curveball.

Bush's administration was making it up in a vacuum. It had been a
decade since Saddam claimed to have destroyed them. The intelligence
failed to produce an accurate account of what happened in the years
since.

Which meant they went with what they (that's a bi-partisan they) thought
was true, which demonstrates that Saddam was a convincing liar. The Dems
were as misled as the Reps.

So Saddam claimed to have had them, which was true, we gave them to him
and he used them against the Kurds.

He claimed to have destroyed them, yet continued to act as if he still
had them. So hard to hide things in a land with lots of convenient
desert. Oh gee, look, we found a Russian made jet fighter totally buried
in a sand dune in the desert.

Of course, that was the only dune in Iraq...wasn't it?

David