550 Tons of Uranium from Iraq

Wait, I thought Iraq wasn’t working on WMD? That’s what I keep seeing in the press. That’s the whole basis for the “Bush Lied” campaign, right?

So, if that’s the case, then how could it possibly be the case that 550 metric tons of Yellow cake arrived in Canada from Iraq yesterday?

The Canadians are going to use the yellowcake to power nuclear reactors.

The Associated Press (link: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gUzCIe4JyTofL4u4RnaUn-75BV2QD91NRH480) claims that the yellowcake was from before the 1991 invasion of Iraq, and that it was being kept safe by the UN. Yeah, right. We all know Saddam kicked the UN out of Iraq in 1998. How do we know what he was going to do with it?

Perhaps he hadn’t turned it into a dirty bomb or sold it to a terrorist YET. But how do we know he wouldn’t have? What was the purpose of him holding on to it?

At the very least, it’s obvious he wanted everyone to know he had it and that he could use it for something nasty at some point. At the very least he held on to this stuff to use it for diplomatic purposes (read extortion).

Dictators don’t have to actually USE something in order to get what they want. They just have to possess it and use it as leverage to get concessions. Look at what N. Korea does. Same thing.

If this had happened in the first six months of the war, then perhaps all this “Bush Lied” crap could have been avoided. Would have been nice if the administration had put a lead foot down on the effort to extract as much of this stuff as publicly as possible from Iraq so as to avoid the inevitable political blowback that has occured.