Some anti-war folks have been unable to comprehend the success of the war with Iraq. They grasp at any conceivable grounds to find fault.
First it was the supposedly stripped Baghdad Museum they made a fuss about. They carped and carped, but their accusations were invalid.
Now it’s the supposed non-existence of WMDs. The Bush-bashers forget that everyone believed Saddam had WMDs. E.g.,[ul][li] German intelligence service reported in 2001 that Hussein was three years away from being able to build three nuclear weapons and that by 2005 Iraq would have a missile with sufficient range to reach Europe.[] Former CIA director John Deutch testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Sept. 19, 1996, that “we believe that [Hussein] retains an undetermined quantity of chemical and biological agents that he would certainly have the ability to deliver against adversaries by aircraft or artillery or by Scud missile systems.”[]French President Jacques Chirac declared this past February that there were probably weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that “we have to find and destroy them.”[]Al Gore declared last September, presumably based on what he had learned as vice president, that Hussein had “stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”[]In 1998, Bill Clinton described Iraq’s “offensive biological warfare capability, notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs.” Clinton accurately reported the view of U.N. weapons inspectors at the time “that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.”Hans Blix reported last January that there was “strong evidence” that Iraq had produced even more anthrax than it had declared “and that at least some of this was retained.” Blix also reported that Iraq possessed 650 kilograms of “bacterial growth media,” enough "to produce . . . 5,000 litres of concentrated anthrax. Blix reported as well that 6,500 “chemical bombs” that Iraq admitted producing still remained unaccounted for. Blix’s team calculated the amount of chemical agent in those bombs at 1,000 tons. [/ul]One cannot blame Bush for believing what everyone else believed. Furthermore, it’s most unlikely that all these people were wrong. Sooner or later we will find out what happened to the WMDs, and the facts will belie the Bush-bashers.[/li]
When that happens, will the Bush-bashers be abashed? Or will the Bush-bashers be unblushing?
Based on the information available at the time, their accusations were very valid. You cannot possibly blame people for being angry over stolen artifacts when the reports available at the time said thousands were missing. It is not the fault of those who were up in arms over this looting that they did not personally visit Baghdad and investigate these claims.
Wow- ran away from the WMD threads and started your own argument, in the wrong forum to boot. Are your convictions and evidence so weak that you needed to hide them in a new thread in the wrong forum?
BTW, leave the conservative clever title schick to the smarter posters- they do it much better. Your’s comes off like the Texas insult about “all hat and no cattle”.
elf6c, december’s just being afraid of being bashed by unabashedly balanced boys and babes who aren’t blowhard, boorish “our boy in office ain’t to blame” bastards.
Where’s Rove on this story ? You pubbies seem to be getting behind the ball. Without quick actio to isolate the problem, such as firing Rumsfeld, the hemorrhaging may continue 'til Bush, like Nixon before him, is hounded from office by America’s liberal press. It’d be sad to see all your dreams of party hegemony go down the tubes over a “few little white lies.”
Is it me, or has december been getting rather prolific in Great Debates lately? I imagine the poor guy must be doing double overtime, standing up for GeeDubya and the Gang admist the growing questions of nonexistent Iraqi WMDs and skewed intelligence reports.
Maybe this OP is just the first sign of his slide into a total meltdown…
Yay! The looters only got their hands on between three an four thousand “priceless” antiquities, as opposed to the whole lot, as it had appeared. What’s “Priceless” X 3000, again?
I don’t blame those who hold the Bush Administration’s feet to the fire over the apparent lack of chemical and biological agents found thus far in Iraq. The search thus far for a smoking gun has been frustrating for everyone involved.
Nevertheless, I do agree with december on this point – there was too much smoke, there HAD to be fire. I dogmatically hold that it’s a patent impossibility that Iraq had absolutely nothing, and had nothing for years.
Since this is not GD, and I’m not trying to win hearts and minds, I feel free to share my unfounded, yet firm, opinions. I think that Iraq perfected the art of illusion regarding their weapons stores. I think that Iraqi techniques of cloaking their programs were leaps and bounds ahead of anything the UN inspectors could even fathom (no Klingon jokes re: cloaking, please). I think the US had weak circumstantial evidence of however Iraq was carrying out the cloaking, yet at the same time was unable to pinpoint weapons storage sites for any significant length of time. I think that the conditions were such that even 12-hour-old intelligence was too old to do inspectors any good.
I think that the mobile labs were designed in such a way that they could be completely cleaned out and converted to ordinary-looking rigs within a matter 0f 1-2 hours at most – maybe even faster.
I think that a big part of Iraq’s cloaking techniques involved creating B&C weapons at sites that also produced legitimate industrial chemicals – especially when the legit chemicals were chemically very close to chemical weapons. Whenever I hear of a site containing “only” pesticide residue, or something like that, in my mind that was a certain weapons site.
