Reply #52: IWR wasn't a blank check for war [View All]

[jmowreader]

At least, it wasn't intended to be.

It was intended to give Bush the authority to stand before Saddam and tell him, if you don't get rid of your program we can do bad things to you.

Saddam, as I recall, was basically screaming "we don't have shit. Okay? We don't have a fucking thing. Your side destroyed 95 percent of everything we had, we destroyed the rest of it. We don't have a chemical plant in this whole Allah-forsaken country, thanks to you, and you can't make a tactically-significant quantity of chemical weapons without one. We don't have enough delivery systems to mount a chemical attack; you took care of that too. Our "program," such as it is, is a few people who used to make the stuff and a book of formulas."

Carrot-and-stick is the approach we were taking toward Iraq--lifting of sanctions was the carrot, war was the stick. Bush took the stick and used it, when the carrot was probably more appropriate.