Jack Straw, the UK Foreign Secretary, has proclaimed that even though no WMDs were found, Saddam was in fact "worse than they thought."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3719522.stm
Quote:
A key report on Saddam Hussein's WMDs shows that he posed a more serious threat than previously imagined, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has said.
It was now no surprise the Iraq Survey Group had found no weapons of mass destruction in the country, he said.
But Mr Straw, speaking in Baghdad, said "the threat from Saddam Hussein in terms of his intentions" was "even starker than we have seen before".
Saddam would have built up his WMDs had he been left in power, Mr Straw added.
"I personally am in no doubt whatever... that had we walked away from Iraq and left Iraq to Saddam, Saddam would have indeed built up his capabilities, built up his strength and posed an even greater threat to the people of Iraq and the people of this region than before," Mr Straw said.
His comments were backed by Iraq's deputy prime minister Dr Barhem Saleh.
He said anyone who doubted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction only needed to visit Halabja - where the former Iraq dictator gassed thousands of Kurds.
He said it would be "very surprising" if press leaks that the survey group had found no WMDs turned out to be true.
"We know Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. We know he used weapons of mass destruction," Dr Saleh said, adding that in his view Saddam Hussein was himself a weapon of mass destruction.
"It would have been just a matter of time for time before he reconstituted these weapons and posed a much more potent danger to the Iraqi people and the international community."
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What the press leaks had left out was how Saddam Hussein was diverting money from the food for oil programme to buy new weapons, Dr Saleh added.
But former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who quit the cabinet over the decision to go to war, said the international community had always known Saddam Hussein had ambitions to have such weapons.
This was why there was a policy of containment which was very successful because he did not have a single weapon of mass destruction, he told the BBC.
"We now know that we did have the extra time that Hans Blix (former UN chief weapons inspector) wanted to finish the job. The war was unnecessary."
Chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer will give details of the Iraq Survey Group's final report to the US Senate later on Wednesday.
Much of the content of the report has been anticipated since a draft of the report was leaked last month.
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It seems as though he is grasping at straws (no pun intended). He is basing his entire evaluation on what he
thinks would've happened, a foundationless "prediction" of Saddam's future intentions.
Personally, I find this kind of reasoning to be patronising and, quite frankly, ridiculous. He proclaims that "the threat from Saddam Hussein in terms of his intentions" was "even starker than we have seen before," but what is this assessment based on?
We seem to have gone from false "facts" to no facts at all - not the progression I would've hoped for.