From: Monte Davis 

"Phil Payne"  wrote:

>Iraq - where a once peaceful and well-regulated state has been turned
>into a nightmare.

Phil, once again you give me (and perhaps some others who think the Bush
policy is disastrous) that old feeling of "with friends like
these..."

I have no doubt that some of the Iraqi exiles pumped up the regime's crimes
(like its WMD capabilities) for an eager neo-con audience in Washington. 
But there were and are more than enough untainted sources
-- Middle Eastern as well as European journalists and other observers
who have no stake in Dubya's fantasies -- to convince me that the former
had a substantial and nasty baseline in fact.

It seems likely to me that the present and long-term consequences of our
invasion will be a greater sum of human misery -- inside and outside Iraq,
including the damage done to the US' future ability to pull off less
hare-brained initiatives -- than _n_ more years of the dictatorship would
have produced. But it's still flat nonsense to call Saddam's Iraq "a
peaceful and well-regulated state."

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