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Comments by YACCS

 

What happened to the WMDs? We don't know.

It's possible Saddam was disarmed five years ago, but we didn't know that then. And we didn't know that in March. And President Clinton has just admitted he still doesn't know:

"When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for," Clinton said on CNN's "Larry King Live."


Clinton said he never found out whether a U.S.-British bombing campaign he ordered in 1998 ended Saddam's capability of producing chemical and biological weapons. "We might have gotten it all, we might have gotten half of it, we might have gotten none of it," he said.

This is not to bash Clinton - nobody else seemed to or seems to know. Pro-war and anti-war folk alike thought that there were WMDs left - remember that a main point in opposition to the war was the fear that Saddam would use such weapons against us. Perhaps the only way to find out for sure was to send in the Army. And if they come back and say "well, golly, the WMD's *were* destroyed five years ago", I can live with that. I'll leave it to war opponents who might be cheered by that news to explain why they feel bombing was justified then in the first place.


Anyway, here's another excerpt from that very same article:

Clinton confined his remarks to biological and chemical weapons, and did not say whether he would consider credible any report that Saddam had wanted to build a nuclear weapons program.


Nonetheless, he suggested that Bush's mistake was par for the course -- and that it was time to move on now that Bush had acknowledged the error.


"You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president," he said. "I mean, you can't make as many calls as you have to without messing up once in a while. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now."

If Clinton can move on, can Clinton democrats?
posted by Peter at 7/23/2003 12:41:00 PM |