they don’t find any evidence of Iraq having had a nuclear program?
By way of a hypothetical scenario:
Fast-forward 1 year from today.
The US managed to get the Security Council to agree to a new resolution on Iraq but Iraq failed to comply so the US (under UN mandate) attacked and removed the Hussein regime.
Civilian casualties were relatively light until UN/US forces reached Baghdad when they got much heavier. Thankfully Saddam never got the chance to use any of his bio or chemical weapons
There is now an interim government in control in Iraq pending democratic elections and Saddam (who amazingly was taken alive) is in prison awaiting trial.
American forces can now go freely wherever they want in Iraq in order to search for evidence of Saddam’s nuclear capability but the problem is they don’t find any.
Former Iraqi government ministers (now in custody) and former Iraqi scientists confirm that, as far as they are aware, Iraq was telling the truth when they said they weren’t building any nukes.
Due to sanctions and the constant surveillance and bombing by the US, they never had the chance to build anything even if they’d wanted to.
Turns out Ritter was right after all.
Bush’s reason for needing to invade Iraq so urgently seems to be that there is an imminent danger that Iraq is going to get nukes. Granted Iraq has also broken many UN resolutions but so have other countries eg India, Israel. What makes Iraq different from the other countries (according to Bush) is that Iraq is led by an expansionist madman who is about to get nukes.
(You could argue that Sharon is an expansionist madman who already has nukes but that’s another thread)
So what if we go there and find out that Iraq wasn’t about to get nukes after all? Won’t this destroy the credibility of the Bush administration and damage future US governments?
You can only cry wolf so often before people stop believing you.
If we go there (to Iraq) and don’t find much will they “big up” what little they do find so as to justify the invasion?
We’re all so caught up in arguing the rights and wrongs of invading but what happens if we do invade and then discover that we had no need to?