I’m not aware of proof that Cheney did any such thing, but even if he did it would have no bearing on anything I said. It’s perfectly obvious that a synergistic relationship very likely either existed or could soon develop between Iraq and any number of terrorist organizations. Hussein had been roundly defeated in the Gulf War and his hopes of regional expansion dashed; he was subjected to no-fly zones and prohibited from taking whatever action he wanted against his own people within his own country; and from his own perspective he was experiencing great difficulty in developing various weapons of mass destruction. All in all, this presented a nearly intolerable state of affairs for a man as prideful and desirous of being feared throughout the region as Saddam Hussein was.
So to my mind it’s not only rational to have concerns that Iraqi WMD could very well end up in terrorist hands, it would have bordered on dereliction of duty not to have concerns about it. I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again - had Bush not taken action against Saddam Hussein and a WMD had found its way into the U.S. and resulted in hundreds or thousands of American deaths, Bush’s opponents on the left here would be screaming bloody murder that he should have seen the likelihood of a synergistic relationship between the two and done something to prevent Iraq’s weapons from falling into terrorist hands.
The fact of the matter is that you simply don’t like Republicans and you don’t trust them to make the right decisions. So you think everything they do is wrong and you will condemn them, no matter which approach they take. And while that is certainly your right, it doesn’t make you right. I feel that the country is definitely safer as a result of both the Iraq war and the steps Bush took to safeguard us here at home, and based on the concerns I outlined above I think it’s perfectly rational to feel that way. You may not agree, but that only means you are of a different opinion, not that you are irrefutably correct.
May I remind you that, during the runup to the war, most of the world’s major intelligence services felt that Hussein had WMD or was working on their development. Bill and Hillary Clinton also made statement indicating they believed Hussein had WMD capability. And the reason for this is that Hussein was playing a cat-and-mouse game with UN inspectors and the rest of the world by doing everything he could to create the impression that he had WMD capability, this so as to improve his standing in the area and intimidate his would-be enemies. So you can hardly fault foreign intelligence services, the Clintons or Bush himself for believing that Hussein had or was developing WMD, and you can hardly fault Bush, in post 9/11 America, for doing everything he could to keep WMD out of the hands of our enemies, up to and including the war in Iraq. If anyone is to blame for the war in Iraq it is Saddam Hussein himself, and not George Bush.
He wouldn’t have had to get them to us. He could merely have put them in the hands of one or another of the numerous terrorist groups who have sworn to attack America and let them do heavy lifting. This would have served a dual purpose - he could attack America by proxy, and he would have plausible deniabilty as to his own involvement.
And there are many types of WMD, as I’m sure you know. They can be not only relatively small and portable nuclear weapons, but chemical and biological as well. And as such, they can be ‘delivered’ simply by being smuggled into the country and transported to their ultimate location - no intercontinental missles required.
