Trying to keep things cool...

The government (U.S.) says it needs more time yet to search for WMD and we all can give them that time before jumping to conclusions.

That said, what does this say about the "justification" to the U.S. and British and Polish people (who had folks on the line directly) and to the rest of the world if WMD are not (ever) found???

I'd say that such a situation would only serve to widen an already existing credibility gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world.
One "justification" cannot simply be replaced by another if the first doesn't pan out! That would be like a jury coming back with a guilty verdict on a serial killer case and saying to the judge 'We are convinced, your Honour, that the defendant did not commit the murders but we do find him to be unsavoury of character so we have found him guilty anyway'.

If WMD are not ever found then it also begs questioning about the CENTCOM reports - on at least 2 separate occasions days apart - that field intercepts heard that Saddam had authorized the use of WMD if... Surely, IF such commands did go to Iraqi troops, they would have had the wherewithall close at hand to carry out the orders! Yet no WMD munitions have been found! Tons and tons and tons of regular weapons have been confiscated, but no WMD. We should all be "curious" about that.

Many felt that the U.S. did do it "because we could" and had ulterior motives for starting the war.
If no WMD are found then I'd expect Prime Minister Blair to feel much like the poodle he was depicted to be by much of the British press. There aren't many leaders in the world who want to feel that THEMSELVES.

It was most fortuitous that the war was so brief. And it may be that the cabal has lost some influence despite that fact by the simple fact that WMDs have yet to be found. I imagine that Secretary Powell has tired of having Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle setting foreign policy for the U.S.



>At the risk of starting a heated discussion, I felt this article from today's issue of the New York Times was worth perusing..
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>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/04/opinion/04FRIE.html
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>Here is an excerpt:
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>Because We Could
>By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
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>he failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.
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>Why? Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.
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>The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there — a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things "martyrs" was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such "martyrs" was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.
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>The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don't believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government — and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen — got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.
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>The "right reason" for this war was the need to partner with Iraqis, post-Saddam, ...
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