<nettime> Just a thought

[Arcadia <snap_d@yahoo.com>]

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: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net