http://polyconomics.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=2420

	To: 	Website Fans, Browsers, Clients 
	From: 	Jude Wanniski 
	Re: 	Answers to Yesterday's Quiz
	

	We posted the quiz yesterday, the day the
	United Nations weapons inspectors made their
	first report to the United Nations Security
	Council on their progress to date. Today we
	post the correct answers, correct at least
	according to our best sources and analysis. If
	you got all the answers correct, you are a
	certified dove. And vice versa. There is,
	though, some room for quibbling.

	1. Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass
	destruction. True or False.

	False. The U.S. Armed Forces only consider a
	nuclear weapon a weapon of mass destruction.
	Iraq has neither nuclear weapons nor chemical
	or biological weapons, although it may possess
	some of the ingredients that would enable it
	to develop a chemical or biological weapon.

	2. Saddam Hussein has had weapons of mass
	destruction in the past. True or False.

	False. Iraq had a program to develop a nuclear
	weapon and acquired a design for one that
	would use highly-enriched uranium (HEU), but
	was unable to produce more than a few grams of
	HEU when it would take several hundred pounds
	to make one nuke.

	3. White House officials assert that Iraq has
	been training terrorists. True or False.

	False. Iraq did support a terrorist network
	prior to 1983, but in that year the U.S.
	offered to provide support for Baghdad in its
	war against Iran on condition that it withdraw
	support from the network. There is no evidence
	it has resumed.

	4. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda's terrorist
	forces have been operating inside Iraq. True
	or False.

	True. Al Qaeda is known to have operatives
	inside Iraq, but in Kurdistan, outside the
	reach of the Baghdad government.

	5. In March 1988, Saddam Hussein committed
	genocide, killing several thousand Iraqi Kurds
	at Halabja with poison gas. True or False.

	False. According to the CIA, "hundreds" of
	Iraqi Kurds died at Halabja when caught
	between the Iraqi and Iranian armies, both of
	whom used gas. The U.S. government in 1990
	concluded the Kurds who died were victims of a
	cyanide-based gas, which the Iranians
	possessed, but not the Iraqi army, which used
	mustard gas.

	6. In August 1988, Saddam Hussein committed
	genocide, killing 100,000 Iraqi Kurds with
	machine guns, then burying them in mass
	graves. True or False.

	False. This is an assertion of Human Rights
	Watch, which originally reported in 1988 that
	100,000 Kurds had been killed by poison gas.
	When U.S. intelligence services uniformly
	dismissed this as a possibility and that there
	was no evidence of mass graves in Kurdistan,
	Human Rights Watch altered its story to say
	the Kurds were put in trucks, driven south,
	machine gunned outside of Kurdistan, and
	buried in mass graves. No such mass graves
	have been found and the U.S. Army War College
	says none exist, that the story was a
	"non-event."

	7. In June 1990, Saddam Hussein asked
	permission of the United States to settle his
	border dispute with Kuwait, with force if
	diplomacy failed. True or False.

	True. Iraq argued that Kuwait was cheating on
	its OPEC agreement to produce only a certain
	amount of oil per day, and was driving down
	the international price of oil. Saddam said
	his country would be bankrupt unless Kuwait
	relented and compensated Iraq from what it had
	stolen from Iraq, by overproducing and by
	slant-drilling into the Iraqi oilfields on the
	other side of the Kuwait border.

	8. In 1990, the United States advised Saddam
	Hussein that his issues with Kuwait were a
	local matter, and that the U.S. had no
	diplomatic obligation to defend Kuwait if
	attacked by Iraq. True or False.

	True. The U.S. State Department testified
	before congressional committees to that
	effect: at the time Saddam Hussein was
	weighing his options with Kuwait.

	9. Saddam Hussein personally assured the
	United States Ambassador to Baghdad that he
	would take no military action against Kuwait
	if the emir of Kuwait -- in a meeting
	scheduled to take place in July 1990 -- agreed
	to end its "economic warfare"" against Iraq.
	True or False.

	True. The Ambassador, April Glaspie, was
	assured and left on vacation. The emir of
	Kuwait decided not to show up at the meeting
	in Baghdad, with assurances from the Pentagon
	that it would defend Kuwait without an
	agreement to do so. Saddam invaded.

	10. After quickly occupying Kuwait, the Iraqi
	army positioned itself on the border of Saudi
	Arabia and threatened an invasion. True or
	False.

	False. The U.S. government advised King Fahd
	that Iraq was poised to invade Saudi Arabia.
	King Fahd sent scouts to check and they could
	find no sign of the Iraqi army. But when the
	Pentagon showed aerial photographs of the
	army, King Fahd agreed to join the coalition.
	Commercial aerial photographs of the region
	subsequently showed no signs of any Iraqi army
	movement at the border area. The details are
	still Pentagon classified.

	11. After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in
	August 1990, Iraq immediately offered to
	negotiate a withdrawal in response to the UN
	demand that it do so. True or False.

	True.

	12. Before President Bush gave the go-ahead
	for Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Saddam
	Hussein agreed to unconditional surrender, and
	began moving his troops out of Kuwait. True or
	False.

	False. There was no "surrender," but two days
	before Desert Storm, USSR President Mikhail
	Gorbachev informed President Bush that Saddam
	had agreed to leave Kuwait without conditions,
	and in fact Radio Baghdad reported its troops
	would be returning. As U.S. ground troops
	moved into Kuwait from Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi
	Republican Guard was already moving back into
	Iraq. When Colin Powell said the plan was to
	encircle the Republican Guard and "kill it,"
	he did not know the elite troops were already
	gone.

	13. The reason the United States and its
	coalition allies only lost 143 troops in the
	Gulf War is that the Iraqi army was
	ill-equipped, demoralized, and did not put up
	a fight. True or False.

	False. The Iraqi army had been ordered to
	withdraw and it only provided a cover for
	retreat. Its conscripts suffered heavy
	casualties as the coalition forces fired upon
	the retreating army in what became known as
	"the turkey shoot."

	14. The Iraqi army committed atrocities during
	the brief occupation of Kuwait, including the
	killings of Kuwaiti newborn infants by taking
	them out of their incubators. True or False.

	False. The Kuwait government hired a NY public
	relations firm to drum up support for U.S.
	military action to oust Iraq. The firm came up
	with the atrocity story, which was
	subsequently exposed when it was revealed the
	source was the daughter of the Kuwait
	information minister, who claimed to be in the
	hospital.

	15. When the Gulf War ended in 1991, the
	United Nations resolved that the economic
	embargo on Iraq would be lifted if Iraq
	destroyed its chemical, biological and nuclear
	weapons programs within six months. Iraq
	refused to do so. True or False.

	False. Iraq did not refuse to do so, but spent
	the next six months destroying all the
	nuclear, chemical and biological programs that
	it had been working on in the 1980's. When the
	UN inspectors arrived, they complained that
	Iraq should not have destroyed the weapons,
	but should have waited for the inspectors to
	verify their existence and supervise their
	destruction. Several of the "gaps" in the
	inspection process that UNMOVIC says are still
	open involve this early snafu.

	16. White House officials now insist U.S.
	policy toward Iraq changed from disarmament to
	"regime change" in the Clinton administration.
	True or False.

	False. "Regime change" was the policy of the
	first Bush administration, which never
	intended to lift the sanctions on Iraq until
	Saddam Hussein had been deposed. It was,
	though, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
	who was the first official to say publicly in
	1997 that the U.S. would oppose the lifting of
	sanctions as long as Saddam was in power, no
	matter what the inspectors found. But
	President Bush had said as much in 1991.
	Former President Nixon also urged his
	followers to oppose lifting of the sanctions
	as long as Saddam remained in power.

	17. In early 1993, Saddam Hussein ordered the
	assassination of former President Bush while
	he was visiting Kuwait City, the assassin
	confessing he had been given a bomb by the
	Iraqi secret service. True or False.

	False. At the time, the CIA reported the Iraqi
	secret service must have been involved, as the
	bomb found by the Kuwaiti police had the
	wiring "signature" of the Iraqis. In his
	December 5, 1993 investigative report in The
	New Yorker, "A Case Not Closed," Seymour Hersh
	found the wiring was of the most common sort.
	It was more likely Kuwait was alarmed at the
	statements of the new President, Bill Clinton,
	who said he was open to negotiations with
	Baghdad and the lifting of the sanctions. The
	"assassination" report ended all possibility
	Clinton could do so, and left him with the
	"regime change" policy.

	18. The "No-Flight" zones in Northern and
	Southern Iraq that have been enforced since
	1992 by the U.S. and British air forces were
	authorized by the United Nations to protect
	the Iraqi Kurds in the north and the Iraqi
	Shi'ites in the South. True or False.

	False. There has been no UN authorization for
	"No-Flight" zones, which are the creations of
	the U.S. government on the rationale that they
	are needed to protect the Kurds and the
	southern Shi'ites. The policy was created when
	the U.S. encouraged the Kurds and Shi'ites to
	revolt against Baghdad after the Gulf War.

	19. Saddam Hussein drove all the Jews out of
	Iraq after the 1967 Israeli war against Egypt.
	True or False.

	False. It was the previous government of Abdul
	Karim Kassim that encouraged the some 200,000
	Jews of Iraq to leave, given the hostile
	reaction to the '67 war among Iraqi Muslims.
	The Ba'ath Party government that followed did
	hang some Jews as Israeli spies, but there
	never has been persecution of Iraqi Jews by
	the Ba'ath government and there are still two
	functioning synagogues in Iraq. Seven percent
	of the population is Catholic.

	20. In 1998, Saddam Hussein refused to permit
	the UN inspectors to come onto presidential
	palace sites and when they insisted, he kicked
	them out of Iraq. True or False.

	False. The original 1991 UN resolutions that
	created the first inspection regime allowed
	Iraq to keep the palace grounds off limits. In
	1998, though, faced with threats of bombing by
	the Clinton administration, Iraq opened all
	"sensitive sites" including the palaces to
	UNSCOM inspectors as long as certain
	modalities were followed. It was when the
	inspectors asked to inspect the Ba'ath Party
	headquarters in Baghdad for evidence of WMD
	without regard to the agreed-upon modalities
	that Iraq refused entry. This led the U.S.
	State Department to instruct the inspectors to
	leave Iraq as the incident was deemed
	sufficient for the U.S. to bomb Iraq. The
	fallout from the incident led the United
	Nations to dissolve UNSCOM and create UNMOVIC,
	which takes the inspectors out of control of
	the U.S. or any other government.

	21. Even if Iraq now has no nuclear weapons
	program, it could start one up as soon as the
	UN inspectors leave and have a nuclear weapon
	within six months or a year. True or False.

	False. Iraq had a clandestine nuclear program
	in the 1980s in violation of its agreement not
	seek nuclear weapons under the
	Non-Proliferation Treaty. It could do so
	because it could import the materials needed
	to build a nuke and assemble them in places
	unknown to the International Atomic Energy
	Agency. The IAEA in 1998 closed this loophole,
	which means that all materials that could
	conceivably be used to build a nuke or make
	fissile material have to be cleared through a
	Nuclear Suppliers Group. And even after the
	IAEA inspection team completes its work under
	UNSC 1441, it will retain the right to repeat
	inspections of Iraq under new protocols
	developed by the agency to make the process
	airtight.


	* * * * *

	As an associate editor of The Wall Street
	Journal from 1972 to 1978, Jude Wanniski
	repopularized the classical theories of
	supply-side economics. His book, The Way The
	World Works , became a foundation of the
	global economic transformation launched by the
	Reagan Administration. He founded Polyconomics
	in 1978 to interpret the impact of political
	events on financial markets, keeping
	institutional investors informed on U.S. and
	world events that bear on their decisions. His
	network of long-standing relationships with
	members of the Executive and Congressional
	branches, the Federal Reserve Board and
	leading opinion makers augments Polyconomics`
	analysis. Mr. Wanniski, and Polyconomics,
	Inc., have achieved recognition worldwide for
	the efficacy of the supply-side
	political-economic model. Mr. Wanniski holds a
	B.A. in Political Science and an M.S. in
	Journalism from the University of California,
	Los Angeles.

	
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