Right War, Right Place, Right Time
Captain Ed has a money post (actually, the third in a series - here are the other two) on Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the Iraqi nuclear scientist who ran Saddam's nuclear-weapons program during the run-up to the first Gulf War, and afterwards managed to hide the core of his research - and a prototype centrifuge for enriching uranium - from UN weapons inspectors until the American invasion in early 2003.
The riveting portion is the following:
"How can anyone stand in front of the world and say that Saddam was insane - but that he offered no danger to the US and the West? At least Obeidi doesn't claim that; he's made it clear that deposing Saddam was the only way to keep him from developing and using WMD. He also tells Drogin who the first target would have been:
"By the time the Persian Gulf War began in January 1991, he had built a prototype centrifuge system capable of turning Iraq's small stockpile of enriched uranium into weapons-grade fuel for a crude atomic bomb. Obeidi suspects that Hussein would have used it against Israel.
'We were so close to getting a bomb,' Obeidi said. 'We were so close to getting tens or hundreds of bombs. To us, the sky was the limit.... Looking back, the world was lucky.'"
"Once again, Obeidi shows us that further delay and further inspections meant little to the Hussein regime. Saddam planned for the eventual collapse of the sanctions and a return to normal trade so that he could once again build his doomsday weapons in the dark. And once built, those weapons could have been used anywhere by anyone Saddam wished, including people like Abu Nidal and Abu Masab al-Zarqawi and others like them Saddam hid in Iraq."
And if we had waited to pass the "global test" of "threat imminency"?
Yeesh. A nuclear Iran and North Korea are nightmares enough.
Ditto abandoning Iraq to the "insurgents," lest we forget the disaster that ensued from our wanton flight from Vietnam.
The riveting portion is the following:
"How can anyone stand in front of the world and say that Saddam was insane - but that he offered no danger to the US and the West? At least Obeidi doesn't claim that; he's made it clear that deposing Saddam was the only way to keep him from developing and using WMD. He also tells Drogin who the first target would have been:
"By the time the Persian Gulf War began in January 1991, he had built a prototype centrifuge system capable of turning Iraq's small stockpile of enriched uranium into weapons-grade fuel for a crude atomic bomb. Obeidi suspects that Hussein would have used it against Israel.
'We were so close to getting a bomb,' Obeidi said. 'We were so close to getting tens or hundreds of bombs. To us, the sky was the limit.... Looking back, the world was lucky.'"
"Once again, Obeidi shows us that further delay and further inspections meant little to the Hussein regime. Saddam planned for the eventual collapse of the sanctions and a return to normal trade so that he could once again build his doomsday weapons in the dark. And once built, those weapons could have been used anywhere by anyone Saddam wished, including people like Abu Nidal and Abu Masab al-Zarqawi and others like them Saddam hid in Iraq."
And if we had waited to pass the "global test" of "threat imminency"?
Yeesh. A nuclear Iran and North Korea are nightmares enough.
Ditto abandoning Iraq to the "insurgents," lest we forget the disaster that ensued from our wanton flight from Vietnam.
posted by JASmius at 10:37 PM
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