Myth Buster: Thank you for making the case I have been pushing since May of this year.

Then what was all the fuss about?

But if Saddam couldn’t afford a weapons regime, he sure had a strange way of proving it.

And I’m no more sanguine about his supposed inability to eventually achieve what he wanted.

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Would the ‘debate’–the argument for and against war–have gone differently had it been known at the time that, because he already possessed it in ample quantity, the question of Saddam’s attempted procurement of yellowcake was already entirely academic?

I say it should have, but sincerely doubt that it would have.

Way out there at the pointed end of the spear, there are fewer shades of gray, one does not think in terms of politics and grand strategy and nuclear weapons and WMD. Think of any cowboy movie you’ve ever seen. You’re the good guy, wearing the white hat. Down the street is the big ugly bad guy who doesn’t like you and has sworn to kill you. He’s got a big freaking gun on his hip, you don’t know if it’s loaded with nuclear warheads or blanks, but you can’t let him take the first shot or the whole town could be destroyed.

So you beat him to the draw and kill him. You save the town and ride off into the sunset to the sound of catcalls from the townspeople who call you a murderous bastard and a threat to world peace.

Did the bad guy’s gun have a WMD bullet in it? Politicians may be debating that for the next ten years. Meanwhile, they’ll be sending you and your faithful steed to rescue another ungrateful town real soon.

humm, Saddam migs were displayed in several countries, you quoted Iran, yes ! but Syria, Turkey, I think in european eastern countries too, and to some Yougoslavia provinces, (I believe, I read something about it a few months ago)

despite the yellow cake

this was from Osirak times, besides these stocks were known from the first Irak campain (desert storm) and were not dangerous as such (otherwise Bush’s father would have delt with them in the first place),
they need too many manipulations that saddam couldn’t afford and or to technically achieve.

the possible WMD that could have been pointed on would rather have been the poisonous gaz that killed Kurds (in Irak and in Iran, supplied by German and US enterprises, uh, Saddam was the best possible friend then

Nearly every major jihadist plot against Western targets in the last two decades somehow leads back to Afghanistan or Pakistan.

— The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who had trained in an Al Qaeda camp on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

— Ahmed Ressam, who plotted to blow up LAX airport in 1999, was trained in Al Qaeda’s Khaldan camp in Afghanistan.

— Key operatives in the suicide attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000 trained in Afghanistan;

— so did all 19 September 11 hijackers.

— The leader of the 2002 Bali attack that killed more than 200 people, mostly Western tourists, was a veteran of the Afghan camps.

— The ringleader of the 2005 London subway bombing was trained by Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

— The British plotters who planned to blow up passenger planes leaving Heathrow in the summer of 2006 were taking direction from Pakistan; a July 25, 2006, e-mail from their Al Qaeda handler in that country, Rashid Rauf, urged them to “get a move on.” If that attack had succeeded, as many as 1,500 would have died.

— The three men who, in 2007, were planning to attack Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. facility in Germany, had trained in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

And yet, as President Obama weighs whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, the connection between the region and Al Qaeda has suddenly become a matter of hot dispute in Washington.
We are told that September 11 was as much a product of plotting in Hamburg as in Afghanistan; that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are quite distinct groups, and that we can therefore defeat the former while tolerating the latter; that flushing jihadists out of one failing state will merely cause them to pop up in another anarchic corner of the globe; that, in the age of the Internet, denying terrorists a physical safe haven isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

These arguments point toward one conclusion: The effort to secure Afghanistan is not a matter of vital U.S. interest.
But those who make this case could not be more mistaken.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Totx7J1nf8U&feature=channel