Thursday, November 4, 2010

Bolton on Iraq invasion

Former UN Ambassador John Bolton on the wisdom and justification of invading Iraq:
Let me just make one quick point on the WMD. The main thing people feared at that time was Saddam Hussein's chemical weapon stocks. That fear was not based on intelligence at all. It was based on Iraq's own declarations in 1991, as part of the cease fire in the first Gulf War, and the fact that over all of the intervening years, Saddam never produced records that showed he had destroyed those weapons as he claimed to the UN. The UN's last Chief Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix, said to the Iraqis, if you had destroyed these chemical weapon stocks, you have records; you have people who can tell us about that destruction. He said that stuff isn't marmalade. The Iraqis never produced it and everybody, and I mean everybody, concluded that having declared the stocks of weapons and failed to show that he had destroyed them, the conclusion was the Iraqis still had those weapons. So, let's be clear about what the concern was. . . So I don't doubt to this day, despite all the anguish that occurred after the overthrow of Saddam, the decision to remove that threat was entirely correct.

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