OCCOM BILL wrote:nimh wrote: Its not that they necessarly thought Iraq didn't have WMD - I'm sure they thought it likely. After all, we knew Iraq still had had WMD a few years before, even if most of them had been destroyed by the inspections regime. But they thought that, in order to OK war, hard evidence was needed that Iraq still had them, and refused to disarm. And the evidence Powell presented was deemed perplexingly unconvincing.
Whether you use the word believed or "thought it likely" it means pretty much the same thing to me. Tony Blair made a very compelling speech about how 9/11 changed his thoughts about how he felt about what he "believed". I'm sure you remember it. Feel free to disagree with the decisions made but I think it is disingenuous to deny others this rationale (connection between 9/11 and Iraq).
I'm not denying that the link, real or imagined, has been a rationale for
Blair; its been one for Bush too. Their bad. Completely irrelevant to the argument here though.
Fox was claiming that not just B&B, but "virtually every nation in the world", including "Germany, France, and the rest of the entire U.N", "believed Saddam had WMD at the time the U.S. invaded Iraq".
At the time the U.S. invaded Iraq: she couldnt have been clearer in his assertion. "The issue then was never whether WMD existed--everybody believed they did". Now the very same assertion has been put forward here earlier by Sofia and then Tarantulas, hence my impatience. Because its plain bull. That was very much
exactly the issue.
France, Germany, Canada did not want to join or OK a war that was based on a mere suspicion of what was "likely" - they wanted evidence that they could believe. I'm sure you were kidding about not seeing the difference between those two things, right? They wanted to be able to go home and tell their people that war was unavoidable and necessary, not because they had some kind of suspicion about it, but because the evidence they were shown convinced them. It didn't. Looking at the "proof" Rumsfeld and Powell brought to the table, Fischer said "I am not convinced. This is my problem and I cannot go to the public and say, well, let's go to war", because "I don't believe in that".
I mean, I'm sorry that you really believed at the time that it was absolutely proven that Saddam still had WMD. It was what your President told you. It must have been a shock to find out he was wrong. But out here, there was lots of scepticism then already. I can imagine that it's nicer to think, well,
everybody believed what I believed, back then - there was no way to know better. But thats just not true.
