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I just saw a pretty interesting program on the military channel dealing with this topic. That is a history of military-political misteping due to the difficulty involved in aquiring good intelligence and then reacting appropriately. One example was the imminent German invasion of the Soviet Union and Stalins' squelching of this information. He was so vehemently in denial of the possibilty of German invasion that he executed intelligence officials who dared to warn him. Other maybe less dramatic examples were the Russian invasion of Czheckloslavakia, the US's mishandling of the situation of the Shaw's Iran, just to name a few of many incidents all bungled because of poor or incomplete intelligence. The point is, is that our current situation is not without precedence. Furthermore, the point this program was trying to present, is that leaders will tend to interpret intelligence or data in a way to suit their own political agenda. I personally believe that the answer may lay somewhere in this context. I mean, whether or not Saddam had the WMD in his posession at that time is almost impossibe to infer, especially due to the difficulty of trying access information given the severe penalty for any Iraqi national trying to get that information out, and outside of the UN trying to access information, forget about planting American operatives. What is known for certain however, is that Saddam had a history of having WMD and no compunction about using it against his own people. Now whether or not he had WMD in his possession at the time of the US invasion I beleive to be a moot point. That is because, Hussien as a leader of an oil rich country and a nation state, had a tremendous potential to aquire WMD. After all think of the economic condition of the former Soviet Union and the surplus of nuclear weapons in that region. How much financial incentive would it have taken to entice some disgruntled former keeper of that gate. So I think the issue sould be more, did he have to means and the motivation to obtain WMD. I think the prevailing opion was yes, and premptive military political action was set accordingly.
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