Friday, October 08, 2004

In the interests of balance...

The NYT reports today that Saddam Hussein bought arms "with ease" although apparently not WMDs.

This isn't really all that surprising- it was common knowledge, for example that Kurdistan's "no-fly zone" constituted a porous zone through which anything could - and apparently did- pass. Probably ditto for the southern no-fly zone.

North Korea and Belarus made perhaps the most aggressive effort to sell advanced military equipment to Iraq, the report says, delivering items that included radar technology that was ultimately used against American attack planes.

President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus was involved in the deals, the report says, noting that he "was anxious that illicit trade should continue on a regular basis and requested that a firm called Belarus Afta be established in Baghdad as a clearinghouse for illicit military trade."


This of course begs the question: why didn't we go after the more immediate and greater threats to our security?

Here's another statement of the obvious from the NYT today...

American intelligence agencies have reported since last fall that the broad outlines of the guerrilla campaign being waged against American forces in Iraq were laid down before the war by the Iraqi Intelligence Service. But the intimate picture spelled out in the report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, provides an extraordinary glimpse of Mr. Hussein and his advisers on the eve of war, just three months after the Iraqi leader had finally told his aides that Iraq no longer possessed chemical weapons.



And they had to "interrrogate" Saddam Hussein and his top aides to get this information???

It seemed kinda obvious to me at the time- can I have their job?



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