Ten Years Ago, Most Dopers Were Against The War. I'm Proud of Us.

Great Debates
161

True, but misleading. Kenneth Pollack implied that Saddam had an ongoing nuclear weapons program and believed that Saddam was a “Serial miscalculator”. So invasion made sense, at least after we got the Afghan situation squared away and it would be better to invade in 2003 than never to invade. According to Pollack, that is.

Pollack was hoodwinked and he hoodwinked me.
http://www.cfr.org/iraq/threatening-storm/p4876
[QUOTE=Kenneth &$@#% Pollack]
Perhaps the single most important reason that the United States must act soon to adopt a new policy toward Iraq is that our old policy, the policy of containment, is eroding. Containment served the United States well since 1991, and much better than most ever thought it could. But it is failing. The United States missed opportunities throughout the post-Gulf War era, first to build a better containment policy and later to reform it so that it could last over the long term. The fault was not entirely our own. …

Finally, there is the problem of Saddam’s nuclear program. Iraq knows how to build a nuclear weapon and did so in 1990-the only thing they were missing was the fissile material, the uranium. Because Iraq has natural uranium deposits, all they need to do is build a process to enrich that uranium to weapons grade and then enrich enough to make one or more Hiroshima-sized weapons. Today, we have information from key defectors and a consensus among knowledgeable experts that the Iraqis are hard at work on such a program and that they have all of the know-how and the technology to do it. The only question is how long it is going to take them. Given the opportunity to deal with the Iraq problem created by 9/11 it would behoove us to decide now how the United States will deal with that eventuality.
[/QUOTE]

162

How did he - some intell guy with a book to sell - trump Blix, Ritter and seven years of (still) on going inspections? Pollack was part of the machine.

163

I’m not sure what you’re asking.

I claimed that Pollack was an intelligent and informed person who gave a pronounced weight to the Iraqi nuclear threat. His post-invasion ruminations were not a profile in courage, IMHO. He says that he didn’t have direct access to the intelligence, but trusted those who did. Charitably speaking, you can say that he erred in the same way that Ezra Klein did: even if you concede that invasion can be a good idea under certain circumstances, it doesn’t follow that invasion will be a good idea if carried out by those who refuse to line up professionals for post-invasion work and instead opt for politically reliable naifs from the Heritage Foundation. For example. This implies that you need to make a cool headed assessment of the actual administration in power, as opposed to a broad brushed characterization of the Guvment.

Less charitably, he should have figured out that it would be unlikely that an effective nuclear weapons program could be carried out under the circumstances that prevailed in post-Desert Storm Iraq. The most that could be created would be a dirty bomb – and that threat would be best addressed by getting Russian stockpiles under lock and key. It’s not like Saddam was the only bad guy in the world and his chief concern was always domestic perceptions anyway.