Boatin... in this case, you're incorrect. I had to run after writing that last list, so it's not quite as good as I had wanted. I got the job (woohoo!), so I was kinda busy. And thanks for the congrats; I'm very happy to finally have a real job after over a year of searching...
Anyway... this thread has moved from "The road to war was paved with lies", through "lies or not, it's politics", to eventually "Saddam's refusal to cooperate does not mean he has had WMDs".
I acknowledge that Smooth is correct in his insistence that Saddam's actions do not proof the existence of WMDs. However, his arguments that Saddam has some big plan, and that his actions were all aimed to accomplish it (my interpretation, could be wrong again!), is as much speculation as my arguments that he was stupid in doing what he did. We just don't know what his true feelings were, and can only judge his actions.
However, all of that does not really matter to the original point of the thread: regardless of Saddam's motivations and plans (which we'll probably never know for sure), the US attacked. They had no reason to believe Saddam, and that was reason enough for them. Saddam's (in)actions were relevant, while his real intentions with that course of (in)action were not. He was obliged by international pressure to prove the destruction of his WMD arsenal, and he failed to do so; one can of course debate whether it could ever truly be proven either way, but that's quite irrelevant: Saddam didn't live up to his pledges, and was removed from power because of it.
By the way, my take on the true reasons for war... It's a combination of many things:
- PR from the liberation of the Iraqi people (overestimated?)
- the final end of Saddam's regime and his *ability* to hide/create WMDs
- the end of the sanctions, which create a lot of anti-US feelings in the middle-east, justified or not
- oil and economy
- a warning to would-be dictators and anti-US people: fuck with us, and you lose
The US government focused on now one, then another reason, depending on the mood of the public and the press. To me, this is acceptable, and actually very smart. The road to war was paved with half-truths and spin, in order to accomplish a just cause (in the eyes of the Bush administration). It is too soon to debate the results, because we're only at the beginning of a new "time line", so to say. We'll see what happens in the next 5, 10, 20 years. Maybe we'll regret this war, and maybe it'll be one of those turning points in history. We just can't know yet, like we cannot yet know whether Saddam had WMDs or not... (sorry, had to say it.)