To Eva Luna:
The professor to whom you refer may well be Shibley Telhami, a professor of Middle Eastern studies who is often interviewed on NPR.
Take a look at this link for one of his articles:
www.bsos.umd.edu/sadat/publications/op-ed/history_and_humiliation.htm
To elucidator: I would personally always question the cause of sincerity in any Beltway politician. Since ripeness isn’t a consideration in our time, then motive must be all.
Elucidator, you claim to have verifiable facts. I’ve seen very few cites in your posts and a whole lot of “invisible pink unicorns”. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask what those facts are, and what are your unimpeachable sources.
Good Lord, child, where have you been? I’ve been arguing this shit for months now, posting cite after cite in numbing regiments of verbiage! And you didn’t see any of it? None?
Can’t help you there, pal. None so blind, and all that.
Finagle, do you not agree that many people must by necesity know the location of the WMDs, this is not true of Saddam.
I think many people might know details of the manufacture of WMDs and programs for developing them. But location is a different matter – the stuff is portable and it doesn’t take a lot of people to move a few tanker trailers into a pit and bulldoze over it or drive it over a convenient border. So I’m kind of agnostic on the subject – as I listed previously, there are lots of reasons why a 250K reward might not be effective, and only one of them is Elucidator’s rhetorical pink unicorn.
(One of the primary reasons is that 250K really isn’t a whole lot of money if you think you might encounter retribution. In Iraq, 250K is a princely sum, but if you have to relocate to the U.S., it’s barely enough to buy and furnish a suburban home.)
As for Saddam, the accounts I’ve read (accuracy unknown) have had him moving from safe house to safe house, taking hostages of the families involved in order to avoid having any of them blow his cover. To maintain that sort of life style, you’d need at least a few lieutenants, bodyguards, and people planning logistics. So he’d certainly leave a trail and eventually someone’s neighbor is going to notice something unusual going on.