If I’d just spent $70 Billion dollars, lots of which would be going to my buddies, I’d probably have a woody too.
As someone who was firmly against the war, i still won’t be very surprised if they do end up finding evidence of some sort of WMD capability. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, and i wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was developing chemical, nuclear or biological weapons.
However, the key point for me in all this–a point which december conveniently glosses over–is not whether there are or are not WMDs, but the fact that the “intelligence” and the “evidence” that was used by the Bush Administration as justification for invasion is now appearing increasingly to have been biased, manipulated or even outright fabricated.
At a minimum, it appears that the Administration was misinformed by the people who should have been providing it with information. If that’s not the case, we have to consider the possibility that the Administration was wilfully misinterpreting the information it had, or that it was putting pressure on the intelligence community to come up with the “right” intelligence.
Whether WMDs are actually found in Iraq or not is of less importance, or should be of less importance to the American people, than the fact that their own government seems to have deliberately misled the people with false information in an effort to justify a preemptive attack on Iraq.
If the police obtain a search warrant based on false premises, and then find drugs in the house, that discovery doesn’t make the initial search legally or morally justified. Similarly in Iraq, the discovery of WMDs will not provide ex post facto justification for the invasion.
Can we at this point let it be established that pretty much any UK intelligence about WMD, on which the US leant heavily, has now been acknowledged by the UK administration to be bunkum.
I’m not denigrating UK intelligence services, but what happens when the information they provided is ignored, obfuscated, exaggerated, spun, and/or fabricated by politicians to fit an outcome that was clearly predetermined.
All those sailors, in T shirts and stuff, you don’t think maybe…Naaahh.
Howard, of course, is also full of shit:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/07/1054700432308.html
This makes sense to me. I’ll bet the intelligence assets on the ground in Iraq were pretty frustrated at having so much circumstantial evidence, yet nothing they could really sink their teeth into. Combine that frustration with pressure from Rumsfeld, et al, to find something … I can see where the truth-stretching started.
There was probably a feel also out in the field of “Well, fuck it – we have 95% of a smoking gun. The rest will surely fall into place very soon. Then our current fudging won’t matter.”
Except that 5% never came.
Yup … on this matter, you may fairly consider me a crank. Not an intractible one, though.
I might change my mind eventually given high enough mounds of evidence, but I want a LOT more time (measured in years). Two months smells hasty to me. YMMV.
Fucking fuck fucking fuck-fuckers fucking fucked… no hang on, I haven’t got the hang of this at all.
“Can we at this point let it be established that pretty much any UK intelligence about WMD” should read “Can we at this point let it be established that pretty much any publically declared UK intelligence about WMD”.
bordelond, s’all good, like the kids say. God knows I’ve been known to embrace my inner crank from time-to-time.
(Maybe I should rephrase that…)
I’ve run out of steam with this particular series of posts – a night away from the thread cost me a degree of fervor (which seems to have been only temporary anyway … I certainly don’t mull this topic over all the time). I don’t think I have much to add after all, save perhaps the results of a private brainstorming session in which I think up ways Iraq may have conceivably hidden their B&C weapons.
I’m sure the collective SMDB couldn’t yawn any more dispassionately.
I can’t prove any of my musings, naturally. They make sense to me, but most others only look askance. So, when forced to deal with the facts so far apparent in this matter, the best thing for me personally to do is just to withold ultimate judgement for the time being, in the hopes that still more shoes may drop.
I feel like I have some time for all this to percolate. The next presidential election is almost 17 months away. As of now, my 2004 vote for Bush hangs in the balance.
Are you saying that it is still “Blair’s position” that they have intelligence but that it is too sensitve to divulge? How could that be the case? If the alleged WMDs are in Iraq, and Iraq is controlled by the allies, how could such information still be sensitive?
If intelligence source X has said “there are WMDs at such-and-such”, well, you’d just go there and see wouldn’t you.
So, in answer to your question, I would say “probably not”.
And if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would Bush jump too because everyone else was doing it?
(And if so, can I watch? Please?)
Look deep within your heart december. I know there is still good in you.
Until he finds it.
Christ he really is a creepy little toad isn’t he?
He’s the only shadow on my bright new future of immigrating to Australia.
It took some time searching the archive for an adequate quote. But I think it was worth it. From this thread:
Posted Feb. 14th 2003. Bolding mine.
It should be noted that december was responding to another post, so quotes are taken out of context.
Yep, I was wrong in this prediction. I admit it.
What I meant was that I doubt MI6 would divulge everything they knew on Iraq, even after occupation.
Similarly, the pre-war estimate of Iraq’s WMD stocks may have been off, but the reality was that Iraq was not complying with various UN resolutions regarding WMDs.
And, they are now getting more people, according to news reports I’ve seen.
If by, “inadaquate”, you mean, “failed to meet utopian perfection,” then I agree. However, I think the planning was very good indeed.
The point of this thread is that some people are striving to find every possible imperfection in this war, and they are ignoring all the major aspects that succeeded. Why are they doing this?
Actually, the best case is honest error, as occurred with the count of missing artifacts. The second-best case is that intelligence analysts, who inevitably work from uncertain information, tended to interpret it in the light of the widespread belief that Iraq had lots of WMDs. Look at how many decades it took for people to stop seeing Martian canals, after Giovanni Schiaparelli’s initial error.
I suppose our basic disagreement is whether the war in Iraq was or was not good for the world. I think it did far more good than harm. You don’t.
BTW I have said that the two trailers were mobile biological weapons labs, but there’s an alternative theory which may make more sense, considering the weather in Iraq. Maybe they were actually Good Humor ice cream trucks. 