> > actually the us has been supplying the saudis with high tech weapons > for decades,
High tech weapons are not inherently WMD. The traditional understanding of WMD encompasses nuclear weapons, biological weapons and chemical weapons. Fighter planes, which are most useful in defense, are not WMD. saddam also. That's a left wing myth. It's a companion piece to the right wing myth that Hussein was behind 9-11. We see at: http://www.fas.org/man/gao/gao9498.htm <quote> Since 1980, U.S. policy has been to deny export licenses for commercial sales of defense items to Iraq, and the Pentagon has not made any foreign military sales to Iraq since 1967. <end quote> Now, one might argue that the GAO is a government agency and they are probably covering up the truth. So, lets look at another site. The Stockholm Peace Institute has a database of arms sales. http://www.sipri.org/contents/webmaster/databases >From it, I compiled the following percentages for the top 10 countries: 1 USSR 68.3% 2 France 12.0% 3 China 11.2% 4 Brazil 2.3% 5 Czechoslovakia 1.1% 6 Egypt 0.8% 7 Poland 0.6% 8 Denmark 0.5% 9 USA 0.5% 10 South Africa 0.4% It's true that the US sales are not zero over the time, but they are less than a quarter of Brazil's. Alberto, I see _you're_ responsible for Hussein. :-) And, I did check if the name was a phony....the director is appointed by the government of Sweden, and it's home page states: <quote> The task of our Institute is to conduct research on questions of conflict and cooperation of importance for international peace and security, with the aim of contributing to an understanding of the conditions for peaceful solutions of international conflicts and for a stable peace. <end quote> The Wikipedia article states that it was originally proposed in 1965 by the Prime Minister of Sweden to commemorate 150 years of unbroken peace in Sweden. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_International_Peace_Research_Institut e I think we can trust those numbers, at least to first order. Hussein was not a creation of the US. He was not supported by the US. US firms had some minimal trade of arms with Hussein, but Denmark, by these numbers, did more to arm Hussein than did the US. >> no one guessed that Hussein was hiding, the fact that he _didn't_ >> have an active WMD program. > not true, i read a pentagon report, before the invasion, that said > just the opposite and predicted many of the problems that would result > if we attempted to occupy iraq. it is likely that some of the wmd > were in syria, but we didn't invade syria, based on unconfirmed intelligence. I read numerous reports and didn't see that. If you could give me a reference to a Pentagon report that stated something on the order of: "The evidence indicates that Hussein has no WMD, and is hiding that fact to keep Iran from invading" before the war, I'd be very interested in seeing it. I've seen one that said that (within paraphrasing) after the war, of course, but that's different. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
