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A strange Iraq what if…

Lets say in a months time US soldiers doing routine searches of old Saddam palaces and bunkers find a secret laboratory previously undetected. Inside the lab they detect radiation. They call in a US NEST team and its determined to be a nuclear weapons fabrication facility. In it are working diagrams of building a nuke and the appearance of several primitive but sturdy designs for nukes that could easily be transported by vehicle and possibly attached to SCUDs. Say 20 KT range.

Now to the complete surprise of everyone there they find evidence that these nuclear weapons were not being designed for the purpose of use against neighbors (Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Isreal), but documents indicate these nukes were to be used in Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and Alqueda. When Saddam is questioned about this he acknowledges he had a nuclear program created for the purpose of dealing with the Afghanistan terrorist threat but suspended the program after the US invasion of Afghanistan. He doesn’t like the US but has no reason to want to get invaded by them and saw the Taliban and Alqueda as a possible threat to his security in that they may attack the US and had plans to deal with the problems in Afghanistan.

How might this change the US stance on its invasion of Iraq and how would the White House deal with the information and release it to the public?

It would be a total vindication of the invasion. The fact thereof would be trumpeted from the rafters by Karl Rove, and war detractors would attempt to use Saddam's intent to mitigate the fact that they were wrong.

Really I don't see how Saddam's good intent overrides the fact that it was in blatant violation of International Law as imposed at the end of Gulf War I.

Damn, none of you can spell hypothetical correctly.

And there would be no mention of what they were going to be used for. The White House would scream "WMD" as looud as possible for months.

Nothing changes. You've got the US discovering this thing, so if it leaks the government will deny deny and deny some more. If it didn't, it'd have to admit that Iraq was a massive MISTAKE; too much time and effort, too many relationships broke and strained, for Iraq to be the kind of mistake your "what if" paints.

The government would say "Okay, we were wrong" and then continue to act as if nothing had happened.

Hey, it's worked so far...

This is one of those that's so fucked up as to be impossible to make even a guess at.

BoredShirtless wrote:Nothing changes. You've got the US discovering this thing, so if it leaks the government will deny deny and deny some more. If it didn't, it'd have to admit that Iraq was a massive MISTAKE; too much time and effort, too many relationships broke and strained, for Iraq to be the kind of mistake your "what if" paints.

the USMC could find neutron bombs with "Kraft en Duechland" emblazend on them and you wouldn't give a shit.

Col. Crackpot wrote:the USMC could find neutron bombs with "Kraft en Duechland" emblazend on them and you wouldn't give a shit.

Man don't hate me for seeing through the lies and propoganda. I was just over in NYC a few weeks ago for a week; I love your country!

In this bizarro-Iraq scenario it doesn't make a difference what his "intent" was - it was a rogue state developing nukes when they weren't supposed to, and that would be the end of it.

Joe is right. Nobody likes the idea of Saddam with nukes. Even if he was going to nuke people we hate we would worry about who would be next.

Thanks for backing me up guys.

Saddam's word and some documents against the word of the US government, yeah, the Republican PR machine will spin that so well it won't even be funny. All the public will know is that Iraq has nukes and plans to use them and that some whack-a-loon ex-dictator named Saddam claims he was going to use them against Afghanistan. Do you honestly believe the US public will believe the truth? If you do, I have some waterfront property to sell you, it's on Mercury.

And then Saddam suffers an "unfortunate accident" and the documents permanently disappear into the NSA, all proof is now gone, and business continues as usual.