It’s about as official as it’s gonna get: there were no WMDs in Iraq.
Game over.
Not according to Richard “Big Dick” Cheney…
"Vice President Dick Cheney revived two controversial assertions about the war in Iraq Thursday, declaring there is “overwhelming evidence” that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with al Qaeda and that two trailers discovered after the war are proof of Iraq’s biological weapons programs.
The vice president stood by positions that others in the administration have largely abandoned in recent months, as preliminary analysis of the trailers has been called into question…"
[snip]
"…“We’ve found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of (a WMD) program,” Cheney said. “I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction.”
That view is at odds with the judgment of the government’s lead weapons inspector, David Kay, who said in an interim report last October that “we have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile biological weapons production effort…”
And so on and so forth.
What the hell is going on here? Cheney didn’t get the memo? Doesn’t read the newspapers? How can he stand there with a straight face and state as unequivocal fact something which, at the very best, is open to question? Is he really that clueless, or do they think that we are?
Powell: Possible Iraq had no WMDs
Game Over ? Hardly. If US voters don't care about being lied too... nothing changes.I don’t think he has a choice. I think they’ve painted themselves into such a corner that they believe any admission on their part that they might have been wrong would be disasterous. Plus, they’ve gotten away with it for this long, why stop now? The Big Lie has worked for them for three years. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But their continued assertions that the nuclear anthrax lasers are there will eventually begin to undermine their credibility. And remember, with a closely split electorate, it doesn’t take too many changed minds to throw them out of office.
At this point, they’re probably considering the possibility of faking something to save face. Perhaps in October, or just before the “power transfer” in June or July. I don’t know if they’ll go through with it or not, but it’s got to be on somebody’s desk about now. They have shown absolutely no compunction to do whatever it takes to hold on to power.
Yup. I don’t expect this thread to get past page 1 without Sam Stone or Scylla or Brutus popping by to tell us that Dick’s probably privvy to some sooper-secret intelligence that he can’t share with anyone else that conclusively proves Saddam had six bazillion tons of Anthrax at his disposal, and the American forces in Iraq will turn 'em up Any Minute Now…
It’s not a matter of fooling all the people all the time, it’s a matter of fooling just enough people some of the time – namely, 51% of the voters on election day 2004.
And 2000 proved you don’t even need that.
Yeah, and?
The invasion of Iraq was less about WMD than it was about 9/11, the same as the first Gulf War was less about stopping aggression than it was about oil.
Saddam still refused to allow UN inspectors to verify his claims, so what is any reasonble person supposed to think of that (particularly post-9/11).
I understand where you’re coming from. Here are my problems with that:
- I’d like to think you need actual evidence of something to go to war, not a lack of evidence against it.
- The September 11th hijackers didn’t need WMD
- There’s no evidence tying Saddam to Al Qaeda or any attacks against America or its allies, and the administration’s attempts to make those connections were/are unverified.
Most of the reasonable persons gave their views above.
Remind me agin, WTF did Iraq have to do with 9/11? Oh yeah…nothing.
Saddam WAS alllowing inspection but Bush invaded anyway. Not that it mattered. Bush had no authority to unilaterally enforce UN Resolutions.
Man, am I ever going to wish the search function was working when Syria coughs up the Iraqi WMDs, or they are used on France for the “headscarf” ban. [aside] The media is really sticking it to France by calling their proposed secularity law a “headscarf ban.” Welcome to our world.
What part of Saddam having a weapons program, hiding it from the UN, and keeping critical elements in place to reconstitute it do people have trouble with?
Moreover, nobody I know ever suggested that actual stockpiles of WMDs were the real reason to attack Iraq. The real reasons are quite obvious to even a half-assed student of modern history. I’d like to think I’m at least that. I’ll do a short list: mass murder, use of WMDs, starting wars, funding terrorism, and mass torture. NO, THERE ARE NOT LOTS OF DICTATORS JUST LIKE SADDAM RUNNING AROUND. That’s the stupidest argument I’ve ever seen trotted out. The other worst mass murder factory (North Korea) is right there on the list (Axis of Evil).
Hating Bush as a 24-7 occupation, consuming all that once made you a human being, I don’t really get.
I laughed at Clinton. I thought he was a big, fat liar. I don’t remember ever expending much emotional energy on the man except when he treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem. So, basically, the left could not be more wrong on foreign policy if it tried to be. Even a stopped clock would blow away standard D logic on foreign policy.
Syria, shutting up.
Lybia, running scared.
North Korea, trying to engage diplomatically.
Saddam, a lice farm
Usama, hiding.
Sorry, but it’s going to take a lot for your leftie “intelligentsia” to convince me that the basic rule of dealing with dictators, religious nutjobs, or thugs have changed.
If you want to spin the rules in the other direction, I guess France, Luxembourg, Germany, and Belgium could form a military alliance and put Saddam back in power. I wish they would try that so I don’t have to listen to their crap any more.
Holy fuck, that was an idiotic post.
In a way there’s a positive side to not finding any WMD. If we had it would have just been more fodder for the anti-American arab press to feed to the unwashed masses, i.e. they just would have said we planted them there.
This way it not so subtly reinforces the idea of just what we are willing and able to do.
Well, in an ideal world he would be impeached, tried for the murder of the 500 soldiers who’ve died so far, never mind the Iraqis, and jailed for the rest of his life.
In the real world, he’s got a better-than-even chance to be re-elected.
And beagle, I hardly spend 24/7 hating the man. Every time I look at my investment account, which has grown prodigiously as a result of having guessed correctly a little more than three years ago that he’d come close to bankrupting the Federal government and therefore send gold to new highs vs the dollar, I do a little bow in the general direction of DC.
Right now, I’m resting comfortably on the cash, waiting for November. If he wins again, I’ll bow again in the general direction of DC, and buy gold again, and sit and wait for him to finish the job. His incompetence is pathetically predictable that way.
I actually sleep about 4-5 hours per night. Hating burns up a lot of energy.
The lack of evidence that it happened? The inspectors were not going to go away in a few weeks and let him do whatever he wanted.
I’m glad your psychic powers have told you what I spent my time thinking about. :rolleyes:
Meanwhile, Clinton passed up on chances to invade Iraq because he felt Al Qaeda was a bigger threat, whereas Bush chose to divert resources from the hunt from Al Qaeda and from his other nation-building project (Afghanistan) to go after Saddam.
That was true before Iraq.
Saddam losing the war (how surprising) justifies starting it?
‘We said we wanted him dead or alive, and almost 2 1/2 years later, he’s hiding.’ Very successful. Hiding is what that guy does. His organization IS STILL AT WORK.
Talk about crap I’m tired of listening to…
I genuinely don’t mean any disrespect but from where I’m standing the “Saddam shipped the WMD’s to Syria” ploy represents the last vestage of the Bush Administrations gossamer tissue of lies, corruption and obfuscation.
Frankly, I have trouble believing that during the siege of Baghdad Saddam was (to paraphrase ex-UK Foreign secretary Robin Cook) holed up in some bunker somewhere arranging the relocation of his WMD’s with a big grin on his face knowing that George Bush would have had to answer some pretty tricky questions once the dust had settled. If he had them, why didn’t he use them? Because he was scared of us? Well if that was the case and he knew that, if push came to shove, he was never going to use them why didn’t he reveal them to the inspectors?
I think the only reasonable resolution to these questions is ‘He didn’t have anything to show’.
We went to war ostensibly because Saddam Hussein had Weapons. Actual Weapons of Mass Destruction. Cases and cases of botulinum toxin, well funded underground laboratories fully staffed and overflowing with VX nerve gas and anthrax cultures. That was what they promised they were saving us from.
The emphasis of the administrations original casus belli has now shifted from actual Weapons of Mass Destruction to the apparatus to manufacture said weapons. This is, in itself, a tacit admission of deceit. It is becoming even more problematic since it seems that there is very little evidence even of a weapons program. A couple of Semi-trailers that tested negative for the presence of WMD’s and some dessicated shells from the Iran/Iraq war does not make a weapons program.
As for hiding anything from the UN, well…as I recall in the run up to war Saddam was co-operating enough with the weapons inspectors enough for Hans Blix to strongly advise giving him more time. That didn’t seem to matter one iota to Baby Bush, however, who apparently had no qualms about conjuring up fictitious weapons from whole cloth to justify the dropping of real ones on innocents.
Several very prominent people stated exactly that.
Not that you’d be able to get them to admit that now, of course. They’re too busy distorting and contorting their previous statements into moebius strips of lies and tortured logic to make them more palatable to the mindless, faceless peon masses before they dump them down the memory hole.
(I’m not saying that you’re mindless and faceless, just that the Administration seems to have a very low estimation of the intelligence of the American Public)
I’d like to deal with these two first since they go together pretty seamlessly. A couple of times now in other threads I’ve raised the point that using Saddam’s atrocities to justify an invasion in which around 10,000 civilians (according to http://www.iraqbodycount.net) have died is a misapplication of Utilitarian reasoning.
Ethical Consequentialist arguments like this always bothers me because it sounds suspiciously like the logic of a shady corporate bean counter totting up the figures and deciding that the cost in lives is balanced by the bottom line. There is a name for this sort of Utilitarian blindness, always believing in the greatest good for the greatest number, and that name is fascism. You can see that almost by definition such impositions are tyrannical.
There is also a name for pointing to the evil deeds of other men to justify your own evil and that is tu quoque fallacy of which the “liberation” argument is a shining example.
The bottom line is actually that the Iraqi people (40% of whom are under the age of 14) were unable to make the conformed consent to take the risk. For the Iraqi dead, the solution was worse than the problem and we did not have the right to make that decision for them.
Besides, at the moment the country seems to be sliding ever more towards Religious Theocracy as militant factions vie for control of the fledgling government. For all we know now it could be a case of ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss’. We really shouldn’t pontificate about how benevolent we were in deposing Saddam until we know that the next regime will actually be any better. Especially since, if it’s worse (and call me cynical here if you like but it’s undoubtedly true) the Shrub most likely won’t rush to ‘liberate’ them a second time.
What we have done in Iraq is instigate the worlds first ever mass mercy killing, without the consent of the people we were killing and at the moment we have absolutely no idea whether or not it actually did any good.
Do you have cites?
Need I remind you that America helped fund at least one (to my knowledge) of those wars and supplied Saddam with weaponry so devastating it would make the hooded hordes of Hades curl up into fetal balls and cry like sissies? When Saddam started wars that benefited us we helped him out as much as we can. Your statement should read “Starting wars that may have jeopardised our interests”. Don’t you think that’s a little hypocritical for a casus belli?
Again, when he used those WMD’s against the Kurds our moral outrage was conspicuous by its absence. We can’t just seize on atrocities we shrugged our shoulders about fifteen years ago and claim they represent a valid reason to launch a Just war. Not if we’re honest with ourselves, anyway.
What, exactly, is wrong with, well… if not actually hating Bush then at least speaking of him with scorn and contempt? To be honest (and please, this is just my opinion) I believe Bush is an amoral scumbag. A sort of anti-midas who turns everything he touches to pure stinking excrement. I don’t base this on his personality but on what I perceive to be the consequences of his actions. It’s not as though Bush ran over my cockerspaniel and then used it as a hood ornament on the ride home. I have no visceral, gut reason for disliking him. I only have my reading of his policies and their consequences. What is wrong, in principle, with holding a bad opinion of Bush based on such readings?
Could you please provide some cites to prove they were making noise?
To an extent, you may be right but I feel that Libya’s admission that they posessed WMD’s was more to do with a desire to rejoin the international community, something they’ve been trying to do for years. YMMV.
[quote]
North Korea, trying to engage diplomatically.
[/quote
My perception is that North Korea is following her own agenda and we’re trying to engage diplomatically with Kim Jong II. Can you elaborate?
LOL 
Umm, hasn’t he always been hiding? And didn’t he recently release a videotape to Al Jazeera with the CIA confirmed was authentic?
I don’t claim to be part of the liberal ‘Intelligentsia’ but I’d appreciate your thoughts.
I’m really, really, really tired of hearing “Bush Lied.”
For f**k’s sake, people…what was said in that State of the Union speech was based on information obtained from the British gov’t which they still claim is accurate. (No cite - it was posted in another thread, which I’ll have to research later, when I’m not quite as tired/lazy as I am at this moment.) Making a decision on inaccurate info (and there was no reason to believe it was inaccurate - Iraq had stonewalled on previous resolutions, and British intelligence has a reputation for being notoriously scrupulous about their reports…they are, after all, British and all that…) is NOT the same as lying…
To the best of my knowledge this president has NOT wagged his finger in the face of the American people and stated something which was 180degrees opposite of the actual case…
(I’m sorry, but if it involves genitalia, it IS sexual relations…)
Apologies, that last post was addressed to Beagle
I get the idea that we are not even talking about weapons of mass destruction–defined as chemical weapons along the lines of nerve gas, mustard gas and other fatal chemical agents, biological weapons like anthrax, and nuclear bombs. We are not even talking about weapons of mass destruction programs that amount to anything more than pipe dreams and the sort of preliminary and incomplete sketches that any intelligent layman could formulate. We are talking about (wait for it) weapons of mass destruction program related activity. While this phrase is useful in trying to keep the soccer moms in a state of nervous anxiety it is difficult of definition.
Presumably, if the janitors from the Greater Baghdad Consolidated Medical Laboratory got together for a co-ed volley ball tournament that would qualify as a WMDPRA. Our friend from the North Country predicted early on that the threshold for WMDs would be lowered but it’s hard to believe we could get much lower than this.
The base problem is that no matter how lame, false or fraudulent the reasons for going into Iraq were, we are there and we can’t get out. Like B’rer Fox we have punched the tar baby and now we’re stuck. We are $200 Billion and 500 dead service people stuck. And now it is starting to look as if we have a civil war on our hands.
There was a song that the troops use to sing when in the presence of tolerant or just plain disgusted officers or NCOs:
“Neck deep in the big muddy, and the big fool said to push on.”
We can trust that the President, the Vice-president and the Secretary of Defense are unfamiliar with the song.