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• Thursday, January 8, 2009 01:00 PM

  @groenhagen

  To equate sanctions with bombs and invasions so that you can vilify Clinton seems to me rather intellectually dishonest. Sure, Sadaam was a nasty dictator. We did not need to do business with him. Our allies agreed with that stance. Did this increase infant mortality? In all likely hood yes. The sanctions were not because of WMDs, but because of Sadaams persecution of Kurds and his failure to follow UN resolutions on weapons inspection. The issues was whether he would allow Hans Blix and the UN inspectors access. Obviously if he did, we would have found that he had no WMDs. Indeed, some argue that Sadaams posturing was designed to convince others that he had weapons so that we would not invade! That was like putting up a "beware of dog sign" and forgetting to get the dog. What the Bush administration did was to use the limited intelligence as a basis for making unsubstantiated claims. They knew very well what the limits of the intelligence were, but chose to present the data as a slam dunk. Similarly, they consistently linked Iraq qith Al-Qaeda, despite the fact that there was no credible evidence. Indeed, Bin-Laden was no friend of Sadaam. We did Bin-Laden a favor by removing Sadaam, who was not an islamic fundamentalist. Anyone who was familiar with the region could have predicted that Iraq would migrate towards Shiite Iran once Sadaam was out of the way.

  —groland Read groland's other letters
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