Thank God Our Elites Are Completely Different From Those Of Saddam Hussein's Iraq

Here's a Washington Post story from December 27, 2001:

Bush administration officials opposed to an attack on Iraq have stressed the differences with Afghanistan. "They're two different countries with different regimes, two different military capabilities," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said recently. "They are so significantly different that you can't take the Afghan model and immediately apply it to Iraq"...

According to a State Department source, Armitage has lined up behind Powell as a skeptic of the Iraqi National Congress plan.

And here's the 2004 WMD report by the CIA:

• According to former Vice President Ramadan, when Saddam announced to the RCC in 1990 that he was going to invade Kuwait, only he and Tariq Aziz expressed doubts about the plan, but they felt they could only do so on preparedness grounds. Nevertheless, the invasion resolution passed unanimously and whatever dissent Ramadan and Tariq Aziz registered was insufficiently robust to have stayed in the memories of other participants in the meeting.

• Yet Saddam's lieutenants in the RCC and other upper echelons were seen by lower levels of the Regime and the public as powerful and influential.