“Irresepctive of the extent to which Wilson may have lied, it seems pretty clearly to be the case that:
- Iraq was not purchasing yellowcake
- Iraq did not have a nuclear program capable of doing anything with yellowcake
- Iraq was not producing nuclear weapons that could be passed to al-Q
Iraq therefore, did not pose either an imminent or a gathering threat, on this issue, that necessitated going to war.
And so I certainly still feel that Bush’s SOTU – using the yellowcake issue as part of an argument for war – was deeply deceptive.
[I added some bullets and paragraph breaks for clarity.]
This is a truly curious (read: “crazy”) conclusion.
If Iraq wasn’t purchasing yellowcake, where did the recent pile of yellowcake come from? So far as I know there’s no Iraqi deposits of refined UO6.
If nuclear weapons are the only WMD issue, why was there such a fuss about the missing chem/bio weapons? (Wouldn’t be moving the goalposts, now that sarin and cyclosarin have been found, would we?)
And given that there are now two independent — and by your argument, bipartisan — commissions that say Bush and Blair were justified to believe that Iraq was trying to obtain yellowcake, how can you logically conclude mentioning it was deceptive?
