| Arcadia on Sat, 19 Jul 2003 18:17:34 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime> Just a thought |
When the Bush people started trying to say that Saddam Hussein was trying to make nuclear weapons from 'scratch,' it seemed an obvious lie to me. The reasons are simple. Throughout the 90's and perhaps even today, many of the weapons of the Soviet Union were available on the black market to anyone with enough money. Iraq had long used Soviet weapons, and so liasonships may well have remained open for Hussein long after the Soviet Union fell. The weapons were already produced, ready to use, close by, and I'd wager it is far easier to hide a weapon in a finished state than to hide a whole development program. I cannot think of any reason why Hussein would have sought to buy raw uranium. Uranium is several steps away from a usable weapon, and those steps invlove time, expense, expertise, facilities that were in short supply in Iraq with inspectors running around. Given the self-evident preposterousness of Bush's claim, I don't think anyone bought into Bush's story who didn't _want_ to buy into it. I expect the CIA eliminated the claim from the earlier speech not because it was disinformation, (like _that_ bothers them) but because it pushed the bounds of credulity, even for republicans. Matt Komoroski __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]