Voorheen_bekend_als_Test schreef op 18 september 2024 14:09:
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Blessed are the ignorant. Uw kletspraat bijvoorbeeld over al-dan-niet bestaande massavernietingswapens is allang achterhaald:
"These traits emerged in the actions the Iraqi government took during the 1990s, which are even more astonishing now that the full story is known. Having largely reconstituted his domestic position following the Gulf War, Saddam had no regrets about anything and was determined to wait out his enemies, regain his military strength and full freedom of action, and continue taking on the world. He recognized that being caught with WMD would be problematic, and so in mid-1991, he got rid of most of his programs—but without telling anybody about it or keeping records of what had been done. “We didn’t know what was destroyed and what was not,” the leader of the Iraqi nuclear program later said. “It was all a big mess.”
Having thus guaranteed utter confusion, and while continuing to deny any charges against him that had not already been proved, Saddam then acted as if everybody should have understood what had happened. In Coll’s words:
"He assumed that an all-powerful C.I.A. already knew that he had no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. . . . Since America knew the truth but nonetheless faked claims that he was still hiding illicit arms, he reasoned, what did this imply? It meant that the Zionists and spies lined up against him were using the WMD issue cynically to advance their conspiracy to oust him from power. He saw no reason to play their game or deal with their prying inspectors."
Yet Coll shows that even high-ranking Iraqi officials were unsure about the state of their country’s WMD programs. At one meeting before the invasion in 2003, for example, Ali Hassan al-Majid—the notorious “Chemical Ali” who oversaw the gassing of Iraq’s Kurds in the 1980s—asked bluntly, “Do we have WMD?” “Don’t you know?” Saddam asked in reply. “No,” said Ali. “No,” Saddam told him. But even then, in the face of an impending American attack predicated on the existence of such weapons, the Iraqis inexplicably made no real attempt to come clean."