DescentBB

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/ ... index.html

interesting.

The headline is "report: no WMD stockpiles in Iraq."

But recall that the UN resolutions said that Saddam had to give up his WMD PROGRAMS -- not just his WMD, but also, the programs to create them. And notice this conclusion:

"[Saddam] wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted," a summary of the report says.

Wasn't that part of the justification to go to war?

But Duelfer also supports Bushâ??s argument that Saddam remained a threat. Interviews with the toppled leader and other former Iraqi officials made clear that Saddam had not lost his ambition to pursue weapons of mass destruction and hoped to revive his weapons program if U.N. sanctions were lifted, his report said.

â??What is clear is that Saddam retained his notions of use of force, and had experiences that demonstrated the utility of WMD,â?

I have a question for the left members of this board. "IF" going to war with Iraq was wrong, then shouldn't we release Saddam?

Bush: "The CIA?" *scoffs* "Sure, go ahead. Trust the people who paid Lee Harvey Os-" *is pulled off into the dark recesses of the White House and replaced with a puppet*

Not this again You know for people who claim that the right was so easily confused by the WMD excuse the left sure can't stop bringing it up.

We've moved on already.

Am I the only one that remembers seeing interviews with Iraqi citizens saying that Saddam's forces burying thier weapons other other incriminating stuff out in the desert?

He knew we were on the way long before it was "official". we had ships already in the area in larger than average numbers. Crazy and psychotic he is, but not stupid. ... never mind he gave us the finger more than once.

am I the only one who sees backpedaling and damage control? OUCH on the report.

Apparently you are Brian.

It's a good thing having stockpiles of WMD's isn't the only reason we went after Saddam or else all those anyone-but-Bushies would actually have something to complain about.

Not to worry, in another 3 1/2 weeks they can take off their anyone-but-bush filters and see the world for what it is again.

Ever notice how narrow the conditions for justification have become in retrospect? Anyway, despite the report's initial spin as an indictment against America's decision to settle the question over Hussein's WMD possession, a closer read (as Lothar has done above) reveals quite the opposite. It's starkly apparent we had to deal with him then or deal will him later. Even Kerry acknowledges that removing Hussein was the correct course (although he would have done it *better* without providing details).

Although they found no evidence that Saddam had made any WMD since 1992, they found documents which showed the "guiding theme" of his regime was to be able to start making them again with as short a lead time as possible."

Saddam, it says, even fooled his own military chiefs into believing that he had WMD. This was designed to deter uprising from rebel Iraqis, on whom he deployed mustard gas in 1988, and aggressors in the Middle East.

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1167592004

Now, if Hussein could fool his own military into believing Iraq had WMD programs, how can so many leftists pretend that it was obvious in hindsight that he did not? And as long as we're strolling down Revisionist Lane, does anyone else remember that at the time the US was united in its determination to remove Hussein as a present/future threat and that pretty much every American felt 17 resolutions were more than sufficient to justify doing it?

About those *allies* that Kerry feels were necessary to obtain their permission, the report is pretty damning and makes it clear there was little hope they would ever live up to their own UN votes.

Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister, told the ISG that the "primary motive for French co-operation" was to secure lucrative oil deals when UN sanctions were lifted. Total, the French oil giant, had been promised exploration rights.

A memo sent to Saddam dated in May last year from his intelligence corps said they met with a "French parliamentarian" who "assured Iraq that France would use its veto in the UN Security Council against any American decision to attack Iraq."

Despite almost two years of mudslinging and distortions, I remain convinced America held to its principles and did the right thing. When the smoke clears in a year or so, I believe even our fair-weather friends will grudgingly admit the world is a safer world for our actions (well, probably not the French ).

it's always damage control Birdseye. He may in fact wanted to reconstitute those programs, that's fine, so why the urgency in the war? Isn't that what everyone asked about? It wasn't the going to war aspect, it was the hurry up and do it without a plan for anything that got people upset. Regardless of the other rationales that were attached after the fact, the sense of urgency to get this done and over with was proven wrong and they still cannot stand up and say they were wrong about the weapons and we should get a bigger tax cut now

Man, it was one slow-azz rush considering it took almost 12 years.

what took 12 years? and whatever it was, it was obviously working because he had nil after that time period, so you are only further proving the extreme left wing leftist liberal crappies points, jeff beck.

bash wrote:Man, it was one slow-azz rush considering it took almost 12 years.

Apparantly we were supposed to wait until a democrat with enough balls to take the heat was in the Whitehouse so he could lead the way.

Or in plain language: Wait until hell freezes over.

Agreed, Z, the more than a decade of sanctions was preventing Hussein from further WMD development. But, as we have since discovered, Hussein had redirected the sanctions against his own people and hijacked the O-F-F program meant to ease the Iraqis' suffering. The sanctions were working but they were causing too much collateral damage. They had to be lifted, everyone agrees, but as the report concludes, Hussein's WMD programs were set to restart the moment the sanctions ended. So what do you do? We were in a lose-lose situation and simply walking away as some (notably our corrupt *allies*) were advocating would have undermined the UN's credibility even more than it has already done to itself, not solved the underlying problem of Hussein ignoring the terms he signed at the conclusion of the first Gulf War and would have basically sent the wrong message to other nations contemplating WMD acquisition. Escalation to removal of Hussein was the only method to achieving a long-term resolution that solved both the West's uncertainty about WMD and the Iraqi people's slow stranglulation.

That was our only intelligent course and I believe most thinking liberals agree. The sanctions were working but they were really only delaying the inevitable as the common Iraqi's suffering increased. Something had to be done and I'm proud that we did it.

I think we're forgetting here the whole debacle of whether or not we could afford to wait for more inspections. Considering now it's clear there were no WMDs and no threat to the US, perhaps we went to war at least a little hastily. I already know your counter argument, so don't bother ;p

brian

Birdseye wrote:I think we're forgetting here the whole debacle of whether or not we could afford to wait for more inspections.

You're right, the whole inspections sham was a debacle! And after twelve years of letting Saddam bribe his way out of jail a new sherrif came to town, and now Saddam's toast.

/me sings theme from Cops: Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you....Bad Boys, Bad Boys....

In addition to Saddam in prison, a lot of people he was starving and torturing are now prospering...kind of a nice side effect of the whole put-the-bad-guys-in-jail-for-a-change trick we played on the world.
No?

I know what you're thinking...there is a down side to all this aggressive enforcement of his long ignored terms of surrender and refusal to comply with U.N. Resolutions. Yep a lot of people are feeling it now.

For example, France and Russia and China will not be getting anymore bribe money for their obstruction in the U.N. Security Council. And N. Korea just lost a big customer in the illegal WMD market. Yea, and bin Laddin won't have the opportunity to take Saddam up on his offer for safe haven in exchange for help in his anti-american terrorist ventures. Those scientists he's been keeping lined up to produce his WMD's are out of work..yep we outsourced those jobs right out from under them!
Khaddafi flinched and gave up his nuke's, poor guy got bamboozled by Bush...hehe!

Oh yea, the democrats they lost big too because they hung their hat on the hopes that america wouldn't see the wisdom of getting rid of a terrorist like Saddam in the process of executing the war on terror. Such a reach there huh...terror...terrorist...
Well, you can't really blame them though because they are used to representing an ignorant and emotionally manipulated constituency...they just don't understand that the majority of americans have a brain to go along with their balls so it's no wonder the democRats don't get it.

Birdseye, this really isn't pointed at you so much as it is to the average leftwit because I know you can make a good case against Bush based on legitimate grounds for disagreement but your "debacle" comment is typical of the narrow view that supports the anyone-but-Bush logic that I find so completely lacking in intelligence that I had to rant a bit.

I already know your counter argument, so don't bother ;p

So you won't be posting in E&C anymore?

after you bow to me and admit "you were right about the intelligence being bad, how do you have such prescience?"



debacle Will doesn't have to be "pro" or "against" the war, the word simply referred to all arguing throughout the inspection process

Again I find it hard to believe that there has been enough digging for the real answers in the midst of all the fighting and violence going on over there.

It also strikes me as very convenient that this was released shortly before elections. Too many people crowing that this is rock solid information when we all know nothing of this nature is ever really rock solid information. It is our government after all.

"It also strikes me as very convenient that this was released shortly before elections"


...by the Bush adminstration. What are you insinuating, self sabatoge?

Let go, Tyr. There are no WMDs. That fact, as Cheney said recently, is old news.

Birdseye wrote:Let go, Tyr. There are no WMDs.

Oh, knock that off. It does no good to suggest that people believe things for irrational, political reasons and need to "let go." Especially not when they say reasonable things like Tyranny just did. Really, I'm in the same boat as he is.

First of all, the report isn't so conclusive as the headline makes it sound. The article even said one of the senators asked the author himself about that.

The article wrote:Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, asked Duelfer about the future likelihood of finding weapons of mass destruction, to which Duelfer replied, "The chance of finding a significant stockpile is less than 5 percent."

...

U.S. officials said the Duelfer report is "comprehensive," but they are not calling it a "final report" because there are still some loose ends to tie up.

One outstanding issue, an official said, is whether Iraq shipped any stockpiles of weapons outside of the country. Another issue, he said, is mobile biological weapons labs, a matter on which he said "there is still useful work to do."

Now, 5 percent is certainly small enough that you can be reasonably sure, but it's also an awful lot bigger than zero. So even the guy who wrote the report is only about 95% sure that there were no weapons. That's pretty sure, but don't go waving it around as gospel truth just yet.

As for me, I'll readily admit that I know next to nothing about whether Iraq had WMD. But I remember hearing that Iraq hadn't accounted for all the weapons it was known to have after Gulf War I. Regaurdless of whether or not stockpiles of such weapons now exist in Iraq (or when we invaded), I want to know where they went!

Did Saddam destroy them secretly? That hardly makes sense--if you want to cow your neighbors by perpetuating the lie that you have them, what do you gain by actually destroying them? It's not like he fooled them and not us--he fooled everybody. Or did Saddam just hide the weapons really, really well? That could be. This is, after all, the guy who made forts out of mosques and armor out of civilians. It could well be that he'd hide things in places we're too clean-minded to think of looking. But then why didn't he use them when it was clear the country was falling? Or did he maybe sell them to others? Or did we miscount in the first place? What's the deal here?

I can't pretend to know. I can't even judge the relative probabilities of all the suggestions I just made. That's why we have reports like this. If the expert says we haven't found any, and the chances of finding some in the future are quite low, then I have to defer to his expertise. But at the same time, I know the guy isn't omniscient, and that weird things happen in this world. And above all else, I don't have the whole story yet! (Some people want to rush so hastily to judgement without the whole story...)

I find persuasive what Tyranny said--there's been a lot of fighting over there, and a lot of reconstruction--I don't know if they've had that much time and energy to put into looking for weapons. But then I also find persuasive those who say that if the weapons were there, we'd have gotten a tip from somebody by now. Everyone from under Saddam who has talked to us has told a story consistent with a bluff--even if it was a bluff they believed. But then again I find persuasive the suggestion that Saddam with depravity, creativity, and time on his side may have hidden things in such a way that we wouldn't find them for decades.

Like I said, I don't know. I know as much about the tactics of hiding and finding WMDs as I do about the deep thoughts of depraved dictators. So it's best for me to defer to experts. If they say it's fairly certain Saddam didn't have WMD--or at least didn't leave stockpiles of them in the country--then it's fairly certain that he didn't. But on the other hand, if they say the report isn't final yet, then it isn't.

I'm not saying I think we'll probably find some. In fact, I think we probably won't. But I am saying that I still regaurd the jury as out, and there's are a lot more I'd like to know before I make a judgement. That's not a political thing. That's just the fact that I don't know the whole story yet. I know how research works--anything that isn't certain, remains uncertain until you entirely rule it out or else get the whole story. If the weapons aren't in Iraq, where did they go and why?

Tyranny said, "Too many people crowing that this is rock solid information when we all know nothing of this nature is ever really rock solid information." Precisely my hangup. So many people seem so anxious to shout "There are no WMD, therefore the war was wrong and the president was stupid!" There fairly surely are no WMD in Iraq. The war was about more than that, and might have been wrong. The wisdom of the president's decision was based on what he knew at the time, and might have been stupid. The more people rush through arguments and don't appreciate the nuances of opposing views, the less I trust them to fairly evaluate the nuances in evidence and reality.

"Let go, there are no WMDs?" Mmm, maybe. I'd say it's not quite that time yet, though maybe it's getting close (or maybe not--that depends on your assumptions and the information you have). But it certainly isn't time yet to go lecturing people about the overwhelming evidence and telling them to let go of their old beliefs. I think there's still a little room for doubt.

Have a little broader perspective, here, Birds. The proof may be overwhelming in your eyes, but that doesn't automatically mean Tyranny is being irrational in withholding judgement. Sometimes people just honestly see the world differently than you do.

Sure, there is a chance. There's also a chance aliens live on the moon, Venus etc. You can't prove they don't live there.

But at this point, again, I agree with Cheney--No WMD? That's old news.

Birdseye wrote:Sure, there is a chance. There's also a chance aliens live on the moon, Venus etc. You can't prove they don't live there.

Heh, I'd like to think I'm not arguing for something as silly as that. It's a little different. That's believing something there never was evidence for. This is changing views due to opposing evidence.

It's less like believing there are lepruchauns in the grass, and more like finally giving in and acknowledging that your keys aren't in the house, after searching extensively--despite the fact that you clearly remember bringing them in. You can do an exhaustive search, and yeah, you should probably give up at some point. But until you find them somewhere else (proving they aren't in the house), or remember that after you brought them in you gave them to your wife (invalidating your evidence that they were), you wonder... maybe you just didn't look hard enough.

Then again, if Cheney's given up, we may be past the giving up point. He's in a better position to judge than I, and probably has more egg on his face about it, too. Odd, the things we count as evidence, isn't it?

Yeah, I knew my analogy wasn't perfect, but what I was getting at was that it's possible but the chance seems awful slim.

Then again, if Cheney's given up, we may be past the giving up point. He's in a better position to judge than I, and probably has more egg on his face about it, too. Odd, the things we count as evidence, isn't it?

Ya, that's what has really clinched it for me. Although the republican knee-jerkers are still grasping at the final straws regarding WMDs, the administration itself finally admits the WMDs aren't there.

so now that it's been established that they (very probably) aren't there... where the heck are they?

sorry bash that i'm finally getting around to counterpost to you...i only have one thing to ask you

were you awake at night crying in disgust as to what was happening to the poor Iraqi's that were suffering? anyone in here, and i'm including the religious zealots, actually have the gall to say they knew and cared are just liars. I certainly didn't, I'm an American, I care about myelf first

So now we're absolutely sure there are no WMD's in Iraq. Funny how not too long age the whole world was absolutely sure there were WMD's in Iraq. I'm always a little sceptable when people are absolutely sure of anything.

woodchip wrote:So now we're absolutely sure there are no WMD's in Iraq. Funny how not too long age the whole world was absolutely sure there were WMD's in Iraq. I'm always a little sceptable when people are absolutely sure of anything.

Woodchip you ignorant slut.

Any world leader who professed to believe Saddam Hussein had WMD is either 1) a complete idiot, or 2) intentionally misleading the American public.

Get with the program.

So lessee...

Desert Fox: President William Jefferson Clinton Launched a Massive Attack Against Iraq to Strike WMD

"MISSION: To strike military and security targets in Iraq that contribute to Iraq's ability to produce, store, maintain and deliver weapons of mass destruction. "

"MISSION GOALS: To degrade Saddam Hussein's ability to make and to use weapons of mass destruction. To diminish Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war against his neighbors. To demonstrate to Saddam Hussein the consequences of violating international obligations."

See: Operation Desert Fox. http://www.defenselink.mil/specials/desert_fox/

"Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons," Clinton said. The Iraqi dictator has used these weapons against his neighbors and his own people, he said, and "left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again."

See: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec1998 ... 12171.html

Say it with me: President Clinton misled the American People.

BD

Bold, I love it when you talk dirty to me.

Sure, Clinton misled the American people. That doesn't really matter now, as he's out of office, and even if it did matter, Desert Fox didn't get a thousand Americans killed or get us bogged down in an occup---oh, sorry---"extended rebuilding effort."

Bush Jr. has gotten a thousand Americans killed and did so by misleading the public, using Bold Deceiver's own standard to judge. Bush Jr. happens to be up for reelection, so there is something that the public can do about him.

Funny how not too long age the whole world was absolutely sure there were WMD's in Iraq. I'm always a little sceptable when people are absolutely sure of anything.

Oh young woodchip, did ye not forget the warnings myself and other "leftists" were so prophetic in declaring?

Certainly, there is the outside chance that somehow the weapons were moved or hidden. The best evidence for me that isn't the case was that Saddam didn't use them against us. If he really was the crazed dictator we made him to be. when we actually went to his country to overthrow him, you'd think he would have used everything he got Somehow I don't picture Saddam as one to *take one for the arab team*

BTW, it's "skeptical"



I know I'm gloating, but it's fun now because we had argument after argument about how I didn't think their intelligence was good. Look, I was surprised at how we found a complete ghost town too--but the Bush claim was insinuating a nuclear threat, massive stockpiles, claiming they had clear information of exactly where stockpiles were, etc.
It's not completely analogous with Clinton.

BlueFlames wrote:Sure, Clinton misled the American people.

Oh sure he did! Everyone knows that U.S. presidents are mysteriously compelled to attack Iraq. But to do so, they must intentionally mislead Americans with untruths in order to follow that fateful Siren's call to arms. Yessir, nothing like an unprovoked attack against some innocent sovereign in the middle east to get you that wartime power high, baby.

And if you wear an aluminum tin foil hat, the government can't read your thoughts. But then, you knew that.

BD