Jan. 12, 2004 - 22:25 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Shorty

A short article on the Commentary page of the Rocky Mountain News of January 12 is worth quoting in its entirety, I think.

"How they kept Saddam happy"

"In the early days of television, there was a science-fiction serial called Captain Video that featured flapping sets and toy rockets visibly suspended by string. The production budgets were so low that dialogue often went something like: "This may look like a Boy Scout flashlight, but actually its a Venusian death ray.'"

"And that, post-Gulf War 1, may sum up a good part of Saddam Hussein's program of weapons of mass destruction, according to a comprehensive piece in The Washington Post."

"After 12 years of sanctions, Iraq's once ambitious and serious efforts to build weapons of mass destruction were at least partially a sham. What had happened was that some of Iraq's scientists were going through the motions of designing and building weapons, tools, parts, materials and software to actually do so."

"But Saddam wanted weapons programs and the cowed scientists pretended to give them to him. Saddam wanted to shoot down U.S. jets, so Iraq's top nuclear scientist kept his team together -- greatly increasing U.S. suspicions of a covert nuclear program -- to design an electromagnetic gun, a technology, said the Post 'decades away from use as a practical weapon.' And one of Iraq's top rocket scientists busied himself designing a long-range missile, basically combining several existing smaller missiles, that was years away from testing, likely to break up on launch and unable to come within a mile of its target."

"President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair were not the only ones misled about Iraq's capacity to deploy weapons of mass destruction. So was Saddam Hussein."

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An "emperors new clothes' which had everyone fooled ?

Humor comes in small packages sometimes, thus this Shorty . . . . . . . . . .

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