No, I didn't read the article about Saddam's warheads. Honestly, I don't know that much about wepons. But, by and large, I expect most countries to have weapons. I would have been surprised indeed if Saddam didn't have more to defend himself with than a couple of rusty old Kalashnikovs.
I have never believed that Saddam had
no weapons. Everybody does. The question is, did he have more WMDs than a lot of other countries? Were his WMDs fully functional at the time of the Iraq war? Did he have more WMDs than the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Israel and Pakistan? Was he able to launch missiles against the United States? No, of course not, because if he had been, President Bush would most certainly have said so. Was he, at the time of the beginning of the Iraq war, able to launch missiles against Israel? Probably not, or President Bush would have said so. (Was Israel, at the time of the beginning of the Iraq war, able to launch missiles against Iraq? Yes, undoubtedly. And according to what I have heard on Swedish radio, some Israeli politicians or militaries have quite recently discussed the possibility of making a unilateral attack on Iran by launching a nuclear warhead at them.)
The question is not if Iraq had
any weapons at all. The question is if the weapons they had made Iraq uniqely dangerous and made them a threat to the whole world, as President Bush claimed. The question is
if they were dangerous enough for the United States to start a war against Iraq over their weapons. Since I don't trust the mainstream media as far as I can throw it, it's very easy for me to find information they won't tell me.
It is up to you not to trust the mainstream media. I certainly don't completely trust them, either. For example, I remember very well how most mainstream media, including my own daily paper which I would describe as conservative, though you might describe it as socialist, said that Iraq most probably had just as many dangerous WMDs as President Bush claimed. And they said this not because they didn't have any other infomation available, because indeed they did. Left-wing Swedish media interviewed Sweden's former weapons inspectors to Iraq, who both said that President Bush's claims seemed far-fetched and improbable. And there were several other experts who were interviewed in left-wing Swedish media, too. It was not as if the information was not available to the right-wing media, but they just ignored it and repeated what President Bush had said. The right-wing media in Sweden were not interested in any facts about Iraq, only in selling the war to us. Sweden's most prestigious daily, Dagens Nyheter, has apologized afterwards, but my own daily paper, Sydsvenskan, hasn't.
I, too, know where I can easily find information that usually makes the mainstream media look biased. Of course, I usually find the information that makes mainstream media look ultra-conservative. I know people who know things, too. For example, I know two persons who have lived in Israel and who regularly return there to work for peace organizations there, and they tell me things about how the Palestinians are treated that I don't think I have read in mainstream American media for a very long time.
Ann
