Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper (washingtonpost.com)

Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper (washingtonpost.com)
Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper
Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage

A long and thorough article on the Iraqi program. Since the invasion of Iraq we've learned how weak our intelligence has been; Libya has confirmed the suspicion that much that was suspected of Iraq was true only of Pakistan.

Late in the article it presents one of the few mitigating explanations of our intelligence failure -- that we read the same reports Sadaam read, and those reports were deceptions designed to preserve the lives and advance the careers of Iraqi engineers and scientists. This theory has the advantage that it may also explain why Sadaam set himself up for invasion. It will be interesting to see if it survives the inspection of historians.

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