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Here's what the guy wrote a co-worker, who's a high-school chum. There's plenty here to go after, but I'd like to hear the DU take.
I'll take this opportunity to send around what I think about the WMD question that you refer to in light of what we've learned since the war. It's worth reading David Kay's report in full -- all 11 single spaced pages of it. (I think the Times printed it, and in any event it is on the CIA web site.)
What I get out of it is that, on the one hand, there is very strong evidence that (1) Saddam wanted to have WMD and took active steps, continuing right up to this spring, to insure that he had technical and production capabilities such that he could have chemical and biological weapons in operationally useful quantities and the means to deliver them very quickly after he decided that having them would be useful, (2) that he was very anxious to have a similar option for nuclear weapons, and (3) that he and his agents took extraordinary precautions to conceal and destroy evidence about the whole subject (which, of course, suggests they had something pretty important and damaging to conceal). Kay's report, however, also shows, on the other hand, that (1) Saddam probably did not actually have very many operationally useful B or C weapons on hand last spring, and (2) that he was only at the start of reconstituting the nuclear weapons program he had had in 1990-91.
Personally, I think in retrospect, and I thought before the war, that such programs coupled with such intent were enough to justify the attack -- with a ruthless dictator with Saddam's record of international aggression, once you are sure he wants WMD and is working actively on programs so he can get them, you are wholly justified to strike early, rather than wait until he has the weapons and striking becomes vastly more difficult. However, I can understand that if you thought that only actual possession of a deliverable arsenal would justify an attack, that standard was not met -- and even more so if you thought that only an "imminent" prospect of actual use of the weapons would justify an attack. (Whether, and to what degree if at all, the Administration deliberately overstated the case is a much more complicated issue.)
I should also add that the story is by no means over. It is theoretically possible that the evidence of programs is somehow false, since it mostly depends on what people told the investigators, not physical evidence. But it is also possible we will eventually find, not only physical evidence of programs, but actual stockpiles. From what I know of clandestine programs, we are by no means necessarily at the end of learning what he was up to. As Kay points out, a significant stock of actual weapons would not take up more than an infinitesimal share of Iraq's total weapons storage. Similarly, only a very small number of technicians and officers would have to be involved in actual production, given the sufficient base of knowledge, technology, and production capability that he clearly had. So I think we need to go on looking, frustrating as it seems.
Tomorrow early I fly out to the training base for the commissioning ceremony for the first battalion of the new Iraqi army. I hope goes smoothly; it is a big step toward putting Iraqis back in charge of their own destiny.
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