Quote:
|
Originally Posted by AChimp
So then why did we get to watch Rumsfeld and Powell get up in front of reporters and start pointing out fuzzy gray shapes on the satellite photos and say, "This here is a chemical plant" and, "This truck has missile parts, and this is what it looks like after we blew it up" and so on?
Can they see inside the building? Can they see inside the truck? According to your own admission, no they can't, so why were they drawing conclusions so quickly? There are many examples of where they discovered that the trucks weren't carrying what they thought when they surveyed the wreakage.
|
They have a system. Of course they wouldn't start blowing shit up without some sort of verification. If other sources placed a big barrel of Nerve Agent in a particular warehouse at a particular time, then a satellite photo showed a Saddam twin struggling to load a barrel marked "VX" onto a truck, they'd blow up the truck... possibly even without the labeling...
Satellite imagery is not our only tool for spying. It's just one of the sexier ones we use. Most of our information still comes from old-fashioned, on-the-ground bribing people. Most of the middle east is pretty much immune to our efforts to do that. Americans will typically NOT live like even Iraqis do for the time it takes to successfully breach them. To be fully trusted in an Arab theocratic society, you have to be vouched for since birth or even longer. You can't fake that, and we don't have the will to imbed agents that deeply.
That's one of the many reasons that we are such good friends with Israel, BTW. That have that kind of motivation.