Quote Originally Posted by Presley Cannady View Post
So where did the pressure to close the curtains on ORHA come from?



Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that Hussein hated the United States so much that he'd clearly risk his life and regime attacking it. I'm also not arguing that Hussein in the 1980s had any intentions of biting the hand that fed him. I also don't argue that Hussein felt he had the freedom to use what little capability UNSCOM hadn't destroyed to attack the US. On the other hand, is it so ridiculous neocons worried about the yet to be quantified odds that Baathist Iraq, sitting on a post-sanction stockpile of chemical and biological weapons with maybe a few nukes to enhance his sense of self-inevitability, might find away to strike back at the guys who'd checked her ambitions for a decade and change.
I think I'm not making myself clear. Any action in strategy must weigh expected benefits against expects costs and risks. Everything in Hussein's behavior indicated that the chances of him providing WMD was exceptionally small. It would have entailed immense risk and almost no benefit. Unlike, say, al Qaeda, he's never shown any inclination to undertake high risk/low benefit action. Therefore the chances of him doing it were slim.

Under the normal logic of strategy, that would have meant that the United States states should only have removed him for that reason IF the expected risks and costs of doing so were low. In other words, the magnitude of the threat should have determined the costs and risks we were willing to bear in order to address the threat.

The administration simply assumed away the costs and risks. If they ever did any serious, rigorous analysis of them, I haven't seen any indication of it. And they amplified the threat, mostly by the clever psychological ploy of intermingling discussions of 9/11 with discussions of Saddam Hussein. Normally--but not always--they didn't draw a direct connection. But over and over, they would mix the two topics in speeches and statements until, to much of the public, there was a connection.

In terms of ORHA becoming CPA, I don't know who approved the name change but it seems far fetched that State did given that DoD had been designated as the agency in charge of the process. DoD remained the lead agency until it was shifted to the NSC. State was never the lead agency from February 2003 until July 2005.