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<p>Blix and his team inspectors returned to Iraq in December 2002, following a period of four years in which no inspections were allowed by Sadaam. The whole world, including Hans Blix, assumed that Sadaam wouldn’t have barred the inspectors unless he were hiding something. When Blix went to Iraq in December 2002, he was sure that he would find WMD programs.</p>
<p>Between December and March 2003, Blix made 700 inspections at over 500 sites. He also worked his way down the list of sites provided by the CIA, many of which were jokes. He and Sadaam danced around access, but as the threat of war increased, Sadaam became very cooperative with the inspections. For example, one of the issues was a large cache of chemical weapons that had been unaccounted for since 1991. The problem was that Iraq had disposed of these years earlier, but couldn’t prove it because they had simply dug a hole in the desert and poured the stuff in the ground. Sadaam made the scientists available, who took Blix’ people to the site and allowed them to do soil testing.</p>
<p>By March, Blix had reached the conclusion that Sadaam had been playing a big “Beware of Dog” game, that he had no WMD programs.</p>
<p>This was exactly the result that Clinton, Levin, and others had hoped for. Coercive diplomacy to force Sadaam to cooperate with the inspectors – the only way to prevent an invasion. The problem was the Bush had already made up him mind to take out Sadaam, not because of WMD, but because it fit the neocon objective of exerting military force to reshape the Middle East. Bush ordered Blix to pull his team out and launched shock 'n awe days later.</p>
<p>mythmom:</p>
<p>In fairness, the entire world believed that Sadaam was pursuing WMD programs. The Clintons assumed he was in the period from 1996 to 1998 when Sadaam booted the inspectors. Remember, Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1993 after Sadaam tried to assassinate George Bush and again in 1998 when Sadaam pulled the plug on inspections. George Tenant was absolutely sure Sadaam had nuclear programs.</p>
<p>As I mentioned earlier, the CIA was inclined to assume the worst because they had been so shocked to find that Sadaam was months away from a having a nuclear weapon at the time of Gulf War I – something that was discovered by accident as a result of Gulf War bombing. The CIA had NO idea. They bombed the nuke facility unknowingly when a couple of US bombers had extra bombs after hitting another target and diverted to attack a secondary target (what they thought was a chemical factory). The next day, doing damage assessment flights, they noticed an incredibly high level of activity at the bombed plant which raised suspicions. Turns out they had hit the Iraqi version of the Manhatten Project. You can well imagine that the intelligence community was pretty determined not to get caught with their pants down again, so there were institutional pressures to assume the worst from then on.</p>
<p>Overlay that with the Cheney/Wolfowitz neocon shadow government running their own intelligence operation out of the Pentagon, relying on a bunch of BS fed to them by Iranian double agent Ahmed Chalibi and silencing the intelligence groups within the CIA and State who were waving huge red flags about the overheated intelligence being championed by the Pentagon. Remember, the Cheney shadow government was spoon feeding their “intelligence” to Judith Miller at the NY Times, who wrote daily “investigative” articles making an “ironclad” case that Sadaam as pursuing nuclear weapons. Nobody had any idea the NYTIMES was participating in a government disinformation campaign, just like Colin Powell had no idea that everything he was given to present to the UN was a pack of lies.</p>
<p>It’s easy to sort it all out with the benefit of hindsight. But, in realtime, it was not unreasonable to assume that Sadaam was pursuing WMD. I know I was shocked when we found nothing in Iraq. The Iraq story is really a story of the comprehensive failure of the CIA.</p>