FINAL WORD ON IRAQ'S WMD SOUNDS VERY FAMILIAR
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The White House seemed hardly to mourn at all, despite the fact that its little "mistake" has cost some 1,300 American lives, not to speak of those Iraqi lives (probably upward of 100,000) they simply don't acknowledge. President Bush noted this new marker only by saying, isn't the world better without Saddam Hussein?
Well, as a harsh and cold-bloodedly realistic judgment, one can argue that neither Iraq nor we are better without Saddam Hussein, despite the president's sleepwalking words.
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But there was at least one other crucial part of Duelfer's first analytical report. Saddam, he said, liked American movies and literature, his favorite being Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." Even more amazing, as late as the 1990s, he was sending emissaries to Washington to try to open a dialogue.
While Saddam "derived prestige from being an enemy of the United States," Duelfer wrote, he also recognized that "it would have been equally prestigious for him" to be a U.S. ally. In fact, Saddam's men approached Duelfer and other U.N. inspectors who were in Iraq in the mid-'90s, saying that "if Iraq had a security relationship with the United States, it might be inclined to dispense with WMD programs and/or ambitions."
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