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The Rush To Patent the Atomic Bomb
dooling writes "In case you were thinking of building your own atom bomb, you may want to weigh your intellectual property liability. It seems there are over 2000 patents covering the atom bomb. To avoid publishing the patents, a central tenet of the patent system, "the project made use of an obscure law whereby patent applications could be filed but no one would actually look at them or evaluate them. They would just be stamped secret and stored in a vault at the patent office." The irony here is that while all the patents were essentially stored in the same place at the patent office and written to be understandable by any engineer, the Manhattan Project worked diligently to compartmentalize knowledge, using code names for just about all aspects of the project and keeping tight security on all information. It seems the patents were filed to give the U.S. government an essential monopoly on the burgeoning nuclear industry and protect it against others who might patent similar technologies later."
And the nearly year-long "rush to war" sure as shit gave Saddam plenty of time to get rid of any WMDs.
Why would he get rid of them?
Oh, I dunno. Maybe he had set up more stooges that would plant stories about them never having been there in the first place. Because Saddam obviously had a plan for the post-invasion insurgency. Zawahiri at the least and probably other Al Qaeda members that wound up playing key parts in the post-invasion insurgency are known to have been in Iraq BEFORE the invasion. Saddam would hide out, wear down US resolve through his bought-and-paid-for mouthpieces, and emerge from his spider hole to return to ruling Iraq after the US left.
But getting caught with piles and piles of WMDs and an active WMD program would ruin those plans. Huge piles of nerve gas are something even simpletons can understand.
And yeah, he had many bought-and-paid-for mouthpieces. He was paying off the Russians, French, and the UN. He was flying US congressmen to Iraq for propaganda purposes. He was funding George Galloway's rants. So Saddam was well-versed in paying for propaganda in the West.
And "Bush lied, people died" is so damn far over the top it's classic Big Lie propaganda itself. Everyone from Bill Clinton and Al Gore to Hosni Mubarak just knew that Saddam had WMDs. Bill Clinton even bombed Iraq multiple times because of them. But no, now we have to hear moonbats ranting that they were never there.
The worst you can say about Bush's decision to invade is that he had decided that trying to use bombing Iraq every few years wasn't working. Given who we now know was benefiting big-time from the Oil-for-Food money - the French, UN in general and Kofi Annan in particular, Russia (hell, a Russian spy was setting Oil-for-Food prices...) it's hard to fathom any reasonable decision that continuing sanctions was viable. And considering that Madeline Albright herself admitted in 1996 that one result of sanctions on Iraq was half a million starved-to-death children, toppling Saddam via invasion as the humane choice as well. Yes - by 1996 the Clinton Administration was admitting to sanctions in Iraq starving half a million Iraqi children or so. But while it was a "hard choice", it was "worth it". Those are the words of Albright herself.
Yeah, you can fault Bush for totally fucking up after the invasion.
But the invasion itself was a rational decision. And even if you believe the Lancet's fictional article regarding the number of deaths in Iraq, that made-up number is still about the same size as the number of deaths Albright admitted had already died just 5 years into the sanctions. Sanctions that would have another 7 years to run until they were ended by the 2003 invasion. So the invasion of Iraq wasn't just a rational decision, it actually resulted in less deaths than if Saddam had been left in power, if you believe Albright's admission about the number of deaths caused by sanctions.
And the funny thing is, Saddam was found to have the infrastructure of a working WMD program in place anyway. And there's evidence that stockpiles of WMDs were moved to Syria. But it's easier for a thinking-impaired person to buy into "Bush lied, people died" for the simple-to-understand reason that no huge piles of WMDs were found in Iraq. Even though logically that doesn't prove a damn thing. And even though we know that Saddam himself was buying propaganda, using stooges as highly placed as US Congressmen.
And yeah, Bush botched Iraq post-invasion, at least until he dumped Rumsfeld.