Friday, October 03, 2003 :::
 
Yesterday's report on the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, by the chief official in that operation, is very difficult to digest, as some Republican legislators have said, and this writer is going to take a little time to digest it.

It does need to be pointed out that we have indeed found a huge amount of material for the building of said weapons, and that Saddam Hussein had indeed led the UN weapons inspectors around by the nose. But even Scott Ritter, who can plausibly be said to have switched sides, admitted that Hussein had probably retained the ability to start the program back up if he wanted to, and that is indeed the case.

But the UN is really an irrelevancy, except as an amplifier for the very worst governments in the world.

The problem is that the Administration conducted a hastily planned war on the basis of an imminent threat from Saddam, and that threat appears to have been something of a chimera. Not so Saddam's support of terrorism, and it seems now that the Administration might have gotten more mileage if that had been their rallying cry.

And if they had slowed down. Only the most diehard defenders of the Administration fail to recognize that many important issues had not been hased out before we went in. The worst fallout from that--aside from the fact that the public is beginning to waver in its support--is that the many smaller countries in the Coalition of the Willing went out on a limb for us, and as it snaps off, they will have a much harder time recovering their standing than we will.

But we are there, and we must do the job properly. The strangely imposed deadline for finding countries willing to supply replacement troops has now passed, and we and the British are still there, largely alone. This blog thinks that is fine; unreliable and undertrained troops are not an answer. The troops from other countries that are there are finding themselves overwhelmed, but let us hasten to add that they deserve to be honored for their bravery and dedcation.

Our own reservists will want to start coming home pretty soon, and as we head toward the hollidays, the domestic pressure is going to increase. Increase funding and troop levels, now, and our people will not feel so lonely.

A Mind That Suits would like to correct one impression he left yesterday, with the admonition to the Bush Administration not to follow a "modified, limited hang out" of facts from the Plame scandal. It is true that Clinton got off scott free by stonewalling in cases where any reasonable person would conclude he was as guilty as hell. Stonewalling works, but it is morally indefensible. The Bush administration should order everyone to cooperate, and if a serious law was violated--a serious law that Republicans insisted on--then the very few heads involved should roll. Then it will be over. Try and drip the information out, and all kinds of horrors follow.



::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:55 AM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.