UN Weapons Inspections (Score 1)

I've seen a lot of revisionist history going on around here. Lots of people claiming that everyone knew Iraq had no new WMD and that the only people who would believe such an obvious lie would be the stupid American public. As this is not how I remember it I did a little research.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2167933.stm - this timeline is interesting. It seems that Iraq liked to play games with throwing weapons inspectors out of the country and letting them back in.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,974998 ,00.html - this Guardian story is interesting as well. Here's a good quote from the story: Mr Blix, a former foreign minister, prefers to remain sanguine. "By and large my relations with the US were good," he said, reiterating his belief that the Iraqi regime would likely never have complied with any of the UN resolutions around disarmament had it not been for the presence of 200,000 US troops in the region.

So Mr. Blix believes the only reason inspections are going on is because we are making them go on.

And yet he feels it necessary for inspections to continue because more information is necessary: http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/Bx27.htm.

So please stop pretending that everyone but the moronic American public knew that Bush was lieing.

When someone has an axe to grind, they grab everything that they can to help them grind it and dismiss the rest. Bush's axe was Iraq and he tried to trump up proof that Iraq had weapons. There was no proof at the time. HOWEVER, that does not mean that there wasn't doubt that Saddam still had weapons. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Oh, and about grinding axes. Too many people on /. have axes to grind. They'll latch onto a story like this and ignore anything that threatens their view.