The effectiveness of Clinton's bombing

Not too long ago, I recieved the following comment in regard to a post I made, in which I mentioned that one of the reasons that Saddam didn't have any WMD when we invaded was that the bombing run Clinton ordered in the late 1990's may have destroyed whatever WMD remained after Gulf War I and the deterioration of the intervening years:

K, this is about the 3rd time I've seen you mention President Clinton's cruise missle attack against Saddam Hussein. You imply that the one little attack wiped out any remaining WMD stocks and capabilities of Iraq. Come on. Just because the missiles may have WJC engraved on the side doesn't make their aim any better or their blast radius any bigger. If current events have proved anything, it is that the truth -- and therefore the target -- is elusive

I had responded by pointing out that even if Clinton's missiles had missed their targets, at the VERY least, they let Saddam know that we had some idea of where he was hiding them, making it quite likely he would have moved any remaining WMD - and rendering any intelligence we had regarding their whereabouts useless (especially given that both Bush and Rumsfeld have said that we were working from the same intelligence Clinton had and had no new intelligence regarding Saddam's WMD).

It seems, however, that I'm not the only one who thinks that Clinton's bombing run might have played a part Saddam's lack of WMDs.

...[I]n an interview conducted late Saturday and published in today's New York Times, Kay says, "I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction. We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on."

Iraq's weapons and facilities, he says, had been destroyed in three phases: by allied bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War; by U.N. inspectors in the half-decade after that war; and by President Clinton's 1998 bombing campaign. (Clinton's airstrikes, by now widely forgotten, were even at the time widely dismissed as a political diversion; they took place during the weekend when the House of Representatives voted for impeachment. But according to Kay, they destroyed Iraq's remaining infrastructure for building chemical weapons.) Kay adds that Saddam tried to resuscitate some of these programs, but - due to sanctions, fear of inspections, and lack of resources - he was not able to do so.

So, maybe there is something to it after all...

Posted by thorswitch at February 12, 2004 09:09 PM | TrackBack