{"id":1037,"date":"2006-03-17T00:53:16","date_gmt":"2006-03-17T00:53:16","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:39","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:39","slug":"call_me_nostrad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1037","title":{"rendered":"Call Me Nostradamus"},"content":{"rendered":"

..or not.<\/p>\n

Power Line<\/a> is all over the Haaretz story<\/a> about Saddam bluffing on WMD.<\/p>\n

One quote caught my eye, however:<\/p>\n

Senior Iraqi officials told their interrogators that Hussein had no idea what the true state of the country’s weapons was, because everyone lied to him and refrained from giving him bad news for fear of being executed.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hmmm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So you get ‘Potemkin weapons’; reports, promises, trailers filled with impressive-looking technical equipment, UAV’s that are really just oversized model airplanes. Occasionally, some competent or especially frightened technician might actually produce something – but almost certainly not on the scale that the dictator believes.<\/p>\n

\nSo Saddam believes he has them, and from that, we infer that he does, and what is really going on is a bunch of nervous paper-shuffling.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal: “Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}