>> I'll summarize this as you just don't trust Hussein to be at all honest,
>
>>despite the fact that those actually doing the inspections believed that
>>there was 80% to 90% certainty that he had disarmed as required by U.N
>>resolutions.
>
> The facts demonstrated by the El Samoud Missile (overlooked by said
>inspectors) pretty much shoots this down.
>
> The UN teams didn't figure out the El Samoud until days before the war.
>

So one missile justifies one hundred billion dollars in cost and thousands of
lives? And I seem to recall -- and I'm happy to be corrected -- the missile
itself wasn't the issue as that it was able to go about 5 miles beyond the
limit it was supposed to be limited to.

So that by your lights justifies all this? Really? Because I can't imagine
any sane person taking that position.

>>Which is fair enough - since you can't prove a negative,
>
> But there are positives that have been establsihed.

Yes, there was material documented and supplied, by us, to Iraq a long time
ago. But as noted not long ago in several British newspapers, including the
Times of London, the shelf life of the nerve gas expired years ago, and the
biological agents were never "weaponized," so they were to all intents and
purposes harmless. As one newspaper put it, the only way you could get hurt by
this stuff was if the missile they were loaded into actually hit you in the
head.


jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
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