Great to see Josh Marshall doing a blog interview. I should do more myself. Even better to see an interview with Kenneth Pollack, the man who’s done more work actually persuading people of the Saddamite threat than anyone. To my mind, here’s the key part, on whether Saddam has nukes or is moving toward nukes. I’ve been relieved to see a widespread skepticism about Baghdad’s nuclear capacity. But here’s Pollack:
But in 1994 we really thought the IAEA had eradicated their nuclear program. And the IAEA really thought that they’d eradicated their nuclear program. And they were telling us they’d eradicated their nuclear program. And Khidhir Hamza comes out and says ‘No, the nuclear program in 1994 was bigger than it had ever been before.’ In point of fact the Iraqis had found all kinds of ways to hide what they were doing. It introduced inefficiencies in what they were doing. For example, they talk about these short track cascades. Normally the cascade is enormous. The way we do it it’s three football fields long. That’s the most efficient way to do it. The Iraqis figured out ways to do short cascades, which didn’t require as much energy, which weren’t as big and therefore were much more easily concealed. They were more inefficient. They didn’t produce the enriched uranium nearly as well. But nevertheless they were able to do it.
Telling, no?
The Dish 