Lawrence Auster Can Be Naive

Mr. Auster is good on a variety of topics, but I find his belief that there was anthing that Saddam could have done to stop the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. to be fairly naive.

Mr. Auster asks:

"What more “face” would he have lost by turning over to the inspectors all his actual information on his WMDs? "

Has Mr. Auster considered he possibility that whatever information he turned over to the inspectors, Bush would still insist that he was hiding something?

"People say that Hussein was not crazy. But his behavior of appearing to conceal WMDs (which apparently he did not even have), which forced America to invade his country and destroy his regime, was crazy. I wonder if he ever realized this."

I think that there is some desire here in Mr. Auster not to consider the possibility that he was duped by the administration.

Of course, this brings up Mr. Auster's reason for believing that Bush could not have lied about the WMDs - esentially, the damage to his reputation from us not finding them would be too great, so he must have thought that Saddam had WMDs for him to make it the public purpose of the war.

This is a reasonable point, but I think that there are good responses to it. I will try to write something about that in the future when I have more time.

That is all.