There’s a nice review of the evidence over at Insight on the News: Iraqi Weapons in Syria. The article is dated April 26, 2004, but I don’t think there’s been any new developments since that time.
It’s amazing what they can tell from satellite photos these days!
I think the term your looking for is “conspiracy theory.”
Yes, in fact Hans Blix admits that he also believed that Saddam must have WMDs based on the U.S.'s certainty about it. (You can hear his views if you go to the NPR Fresh Air site and call up his interview in their archives.) However, he began to revise his opinion when he actually began checking the sites that the Americans told him to and finding nothing. And, he expressed these concerns to the U.S. (in the form of Condaleesa Rice, if I remember correctly).
It is precisely because these doubts were already being expressed before we voted to authorize Bush to invade that I am deeply disappointed in Sen. Kerry.
Bush never let evidence get in his way at any point. He’s in a completely different league of deception.
I share your “disappointment”, Loopy. 'Struth, I’ve raved and snorted about spineless Dumbocrats caving in. But lets remind ourselves of some facts.
First, the Pubbies were in high dudgeon, the mid-terms looked shaky, and they seized upon this like a starving dog on a T-bone. They had the Dems in a box: vote with us, and let us have our way with you, or vote against, and we’ll smear you from coast to coast for your lack of patriotism and failure to support GeeDubya (Praise the Leader!) in Time of War. The shit they poured down on our own Paul Wellstone was disgraceful, never mind what they pulled on Cleland.
As well, Kerry has a point: for good or ill, GeeDubya was the President. The evidence was vague and contradictory, but we only got the one President. It was inportant to present a unified face in a crisis, it was important that the President have options. Its a pity that such was squandered on the likes of him, but them’s the breaks.
The resolution itself is a classic example of “yes, repeat no”, a firm resolution drafted by committee so it means damn near everything, and nothing. A Dem might have been content with the provisos and caveats built in to it, that it demanded enough consultation to keep a check on a reasonable man.
If there was any failure, it was in trusting GeeDubya to play straight. Our own Mr. Wellstone did not trust GeeDubya, and, it turns out, rightly so. But a reasonable man would have to be uncertain. And I can entirely understand how a reasonable man might be forced to extend some trust, even with grave misgivings. He was, as I noted, the only President we got.
In that light, Sen Kerrys recent remarks show him in an entirely respectable light: if he were President, wouldn’t he expect the benefit of the doubt, with so much at risk? It would be politically expedient to claim otherwise, and I about half wish he would, the stakes are so high. But he has did not, and does not, and I submit that is an honorable position, indeed, far more honorable and honest than anything GeeDubya has shown.