Teribus,

Just to take one of your many vulnerable points

Firstly the arsenal of weapons that Saddam was accused of having was quantified by the United Nations UNSCOM Inspection Team - Not by George Bush.

This is quite wrong.

The UN quantified material that was "unaccounted for." The inspectors did not accuse Iraq of having the materials, it simply noted that Iraq had not yet PROVEN that the materials had been destroyed. Most of the inspectors felt that a lot more time would be needed before any accusation should be made, and Blix frankly felt that much of the material WOULD be accounted for and that other of it would NOT be, and that no one, including probably the Iraqis, had a good idea of what remained. On the basis of this, he wanted to keep looking because he felt war was not yet necessary, and he could still do some good.

What Bush did was to ignore Blix's recommendations and his stated beliefs about was and was not in Iraq, and accuse Iraq of having a stockpile consisting of all the materials it could not prove had been destroyed. For good measure he accused them of possibly having mythical imported items (yellowcake from Niger, etc) that the UN had never listed, and had his cronies like Condoleeza Rice tell us that mushroom cloud was a likely possibility--none of which was remotely credible to the UN inspectors.

So the accusation was quantified by Bush, not the UN. He used some UN data, but ignored the UN's interpretation of what those data meant. Just like he used the UN resolution as an excuse, but ignored the UN's determination of how that resolution was to be enforced. It all goes back to what I said at   07 Jul 04 - 11:37 AM:

Anyone using UN violations as a reason to attack is having his cake and eating it, saying that we should listen to the UN only when they say what we want to hear, and otherwise ignore them. Thus, what the UN said becomes a red herring.

Same with the weapons inspectors. People use the content of their reports as a reason to ignore their recommendations. But if their recommendations are wrong, why assume the other parts of the reports are right?

In both cases, the administration took the outcome they wanted (which we know the neocons had wanted for a long time), looked for any statement made by anyone that could support their position, and ignored any statement made by anyone that did NOT support their position; often, this entailed accepting the validity of a person's opinion about one thing, and rejecting the validity of the same person's opinion about something else, with no justification beyond "it gives us the result we want."

You would never get away with this kind of reasoning in science, but in the "art of war" it appears that no-one looks too closely.