No, it isn't.

Niger is Still a Lie. So says Delaware Liberal.

Except that as with most things, he's wrong.

http://delawareliberal.wordpress.com/2007/04/03/niger-is-still-a-lie/

No, it isn't.

"Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away."


That was the conventional wisdom before the war. All this hue and cry about "lies" are Monday morning quarterbacking and partisan hackery.

Occam's Razor alone is enough to tumble this house of cards. Niger has two main exports. Uranium and livestock. The former comprises the vast majority of their exports. When Joe Wilson quoted an unnamed Nigerian official speaking about the Iraqis as saying “You know, maybe they might have wanted to talk about uranium.”

The fraudulent documents are believed by some to have been manufactured afterwards as a means of gutting confidence in pre-war intelligence. The Brits in the form of Tony Blair have said they didn't use those forgeries to determine the veracity of Iraqi attempts to purchase Uranium from Niger.

The report indicated that there was enough intelligence to make a “well-founded” judgment that Saddam Hussein was seeking, perhaps as late as 2002, to obtain uranium illegally from Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo (6.4 para. 499). In particular, referring to a 1999 visit of Iraqi officials to Niger, the report states (6.4 para. 503): “The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.”

In the end this is a political debate, not a factual one. Retconning
the runup to the war will not change things. Further, we are already there and already committed to say we should pull out now and abandon the Iraqis to their fate is callow and cowardly.

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