It was either/or

Condi Rice, clearly armed with some new abysmal talking points in Stockholm today --

So the threat from Saddam Hussein was well understood. You can agree or disagree about the decision to liberate Iraq in 2003. But I would really ask: Do people really believe that he was not a threat to the international community? And if you believe that he was not a threat to the international community, then why in the world were you allowing the Iraqi people to suffer under the terms of Oil-for-Food?

The purpose of UN Oil-for-Food was to prevent Saddam from getting WMDs. And it worked! The people opposed to Oil-for-Food were Saddam Hussein, George Galloway -- and the neocons, who used tales of corruption and leakage from oil-for-food to discredit it, even when it was achieving its main objective while delivering food to the Iraqi people (and oil to the rest of the world). But Condi now turns things around and uses the existence of Oil-for-Food as part of the case for war. Or, does she merge this theory with her new Versailles analogy for the sanctions and say that Oil-for-Food made the second war inevitable?