From Newsmax.com:
----------------------------------------
Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said Clinton told him he believed Iraq possessed such weapons right up until former dictator Saddam Hussein was deposed.
"When Clinton was here recently he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."
Clinton met with Durao Barroso on October 21 when he traveled to Lisbon to give a speech on globalization.
--Durao Barroso on Portuguese cable news channel SIC Noticias.
-------------------------------------------
Everyone who is or has been a fan of football can give you the definition of an "armchair quarterback." They're the people who, likely not having played a day of football in their lives, blithely explain to everyone around them — while you are trying to watch the game — how the game should be played.
Would you like to know what is worse? The nine armchair presidents who, not having served a day in their lives as President would like you to believe that they know better than both Presidents Clinton and Bush when it comes to Iraq. No offense but, what do they know?
Now, I acknowledge the fact that our current President was in the armchair himself when running for office in 2000, but the circumstances here are quite different. In 2004, the entire Democratic primary process to date, it seems, is centered around a debate over the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Was this a continuation of the war on terror or was it not? Did Saddam have weapons of mass destruction or did he not? Should UN inspectors have had more time, or was 12 years of non-compliance enough?
Howard Dean, of course, has harnessed the zeal of the angry left for his campaign and has, if you'll pardon the word, pre-emptively turned the primaries into a Democratic referendum on Iraq. As Dean has pointed out endlessly to voters, its a choice between himself or one of his Democratic opponents, whom he has labelled "Bush-lite" because they chose, in one form or another to support the ouster of Saddam.
But now we hear of a meeting that former President Bill Clinton had with Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso in which Clinton stated that he was convinced that Iraq had WMD right up until the point where Hussein was ousted. Why did he believe this? Because, as President, Bill Clinton had access to intelligence that few others were allowed to see.
Article comments
1 - Winston Smith
(1) The question isn't 'did SH have WMDs?', the question is 'did SH have anything that posed a significant and relatively immediate threat to the U.S.?' Answer, of course: No.
2. And it isn't even true to say that everybody thought that Saddam had significant WMDs: The CIA--the *experts*--concluded that he didn't. The Bush admin., of course, ignored this scientific conclusion as they ignore all scientific conclusions that don't cohere with their political preferences.
3. I'll admit, my guess was that SH DID have some WMD, but I was never fooled into thinking that he had any way to deliver them to the U.S.
4. And, since there was absolutely no credible evidence of a link between SH and al Qaeda, there was no reason to fear that he'd get the weapons here that way.
5. The issue isn't whether or not Clinton thought SH had WMD; the issue is whether the Bush admin lied to us and distorted the evidence. They did, as is proven in several places, most recently the report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, but also earlier by Judis and Ackerman in their "The Selling of the Iraq War" in the New Republic.
WS
2 - David Flanagan
Winston,
Obviously Bill Clinton did not see Osama bin Laden as a "significant and relatively immediate threat to the U.S.," which is why he passed on offers from at least two foreign powers to hand him over to us. Unfortunately for 3000 innocent civilians and 10,000 families, we found out on September 11, 2001 exactly how significant a threat OBL really was.
Which is exactly why President Bush argued in his State of The Union speech last year that we could not afford to wait until Iraq became an imminent threat. Instead, he argued that we had to deal with Saddam while we were still in a position to do so, rather than after the fact, as we did with 9/11.
As for SH having possessed WMD, everyone thought he did. Significant amounts? No one knew for sure. Even Bill Clinton recently admitted that, right up to the liberation of Iraq, he thought that SH must have had those weapons. Wesley Clark testified before congress two weeks before congress gave the President authorization that HE believed Saddam had the weapons and that there was a real sense of urgency in going after Saddam before he could do something, directly or indirectly, to hurt us.
As for the accusation that the Bush Administration distorted evidence, they used the same evidence as was used by the Clinton Administration, the same evidence that was given by the CIA as well as British Intelligence. The arguments I've seen to date on this so-called "distortion" is all re-used over and over by different groups. There is nothing new under the sun.
Did SH have direct ties to al Qaeda? We don't know yet, some experts say yes, some say no. What we do know is that he had ties to some terrorist organizations because US and Kurdish troops found their camps and engaged them during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
So, perhaps OBL would not have gotten weapons directly from Saddam. So what? He could have gotten them third or fourth-hand through other organizations, which is they way OBL designed his terrorist network. First, the network was designed to plant small, independent groups that could carry out attacks at will and second, it was designed to foster cooperation between varying groups when it was mutually beneficial. Your argument here is too simplistic to have any merit.
Thanks.
David Flanagan