Seymour Hersch wrote an investigative piece on the alleged assassination plot in the New Yorker. I recommend it to you. While it doesn’t make a case for exoneration, it points out areas where considerable doubt exist. To oversimplify, America took the word of the Kuwaiti intelligence that it was so.
As to the plot to poison American troops - piffle. If there were positive proof, Ari Fleisher would be trumpeting it on CNN, 24/7. Hell, if there were even a shred of plausible evidence, he would be doing so.
Um. december. you do know that would be an empty threat right? Saddam has no nukes, and no viable nuclear weapons program.
Besides, he had chemical weapons he could have used on troops in the Gulf war and he was deterred then by our threats. The man isn’t really crazy, unless you define a willingness to harm his citizens as crazy. He’s certainly deterrable.
"Al-Watan, an independent paper known to have reliable contacts in the Interior Ministry, said al-Juwayed was involved in a plot to kill “a large number of [U.S.] soldiers through poisoning their food.” "
"The Interior Ministry announced al-Juwayed’s arrest on Friday, saying he gave military information to Iraq and spied on senior Kuwaiti officials “with the intent of facilitating terrorist and sabotage operations.” "
I already did present it. The Kuwaiti Cabinet commented on it, as evinced in the first two articles. The third article is an earlier article, and what you quoted was from it. It was written before all details were displayed.
The humanitarian case for war
[slight hijack] IMHO, the case for war turns on how much trust you put in deterrence. Given that the sanctions regime has broken down, it is only a matter of time before Saddam aquires nuclear weapons. Deterrence advocates say that Saddam is homocidal, not suicidal and that he is therefore unlikely to lob a nuke at Tel Aviv or Saudi oil fields, where over 10% of world reserves could be eliminated with a single boom.
Skeptics of deterrence note that Saddam is a serial miscalculator, who has launched three or more ill-fated military adventures with poor planning and not a little wishful thinking. [/slight hijack]
Now then. Let’s do the cost/benefit analysis. Benefits of Victory over Saddam
-> Above mentioned threats eliminated.
-> Less likely threat to US cities (delivery via nuke installation, not ballistic missile) curtailed.
-> Shift to a nondemocratic regime with a less invasive Secret Police apparatus (given pessimism about installing democracy in Iraq)
-> End to UN sanctions: Iraq is put back on a development path, as opposed to a militaristic cul-de-sac. Garfield http://www.fourthfreedom.org/php/t-si-index.php?hinc=garf-sum.hinc , estimates that sanctions have killed 75,000 - 170,000 children (note that I took out the 25% of child deaths that were thought to have occured during the Gulf War, mostly when the Iraqi army put down the Shiite uprising in the south, according to Pollack) from 1990-1998.
-> Under an optimistic scenerio, it would be nice if there were an energetic Muslim dominated country other than Turkey. This might promote reform in the wider Arab world.
Costs of Victory over Saddam
US:
-> Worst case scenerio, according to Kenneth Pollack: 10,000 US troop deaths, 3-6 months of war.
-> Middle scenerio: 500-1000 US troop deaths, 4-8 weeks of war.
-> Best case scenerio: overthrow of Saddam immediately before war breaks out.
Iraq:
-> The first gulf war probably killed something like 10,000 - 30,000 Iraqi soldiers and 1,000-5,000 Iraqi civilians.
Conclusion: Full scale combat may be preferable to sanctions that have lost their teeth with regards to the Iraqi military, but continue to bear down on the Iraqi people.
And a caveat
Obviously, these figures are highly contentious. Feel free to cite your own.
He has refused to give up his WMDs for 12 years. He’s still holding on to them. If he’s so deterrable, how come our boycotts, troops, weapons and the threat of imminent attack haven’t deterred him?
No he’s not, “certainly deterrable”. He’s “possibly deterrable”: reasonable people disagree on this point.
The single case of Saddam Hussein being deterred was during the Gulf War, when weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were not used.
But even then, his existing delivery systems may have been technically inadequate. In the case of Israel, it wasn’t clear whether the agents would survive re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere and the fuses in the missile were of the type that would cause the missile to detonate on impact, rather than above their target. “In other words, Saddam may have fired only conventionally armed missiles at Israel because these were the only functional missiles he had.” (Pollack, p. 263)
There is an ambiguous CIA report that Saddam used biological weapons against coalition forces during the Gulf War, but this can probably be discounted.
US forces over-ran Iraqi positions quickly enough, that Iraqi units may have been unable to load and arm chemical weapons in time.
And, actually, Saddam was not entirely deterred. James Baker’s letter of January 1991 threatened Saddam with “dire consequences” if he used WMDs or if he destroyed Kuwaiti oil fields or tried to mount terrorist attacks. Saddam was possibly deterred in the first case, but he was definitely not with respect to oil field sabotage or terrorist operations. [No, I don’t know what attempted terrorist operations Pollack is alluding to here, p. 265].