Or, indeed, the actual difference?
No. I see no difference in the activities of international inspectors and spies. My point is I don’t see this as some sort of legitimate reason for Saddam to stop the inspections. In some other country or some other circumstance the difference would be meaningful. In Iraq during the 90s I’m not at all sure it was.
TheSquirrelfishI cannot understand your question. Especially in reference to the portion of my post you quoted. Can you ask again and state what two things you want me to compare legally?
To me the work of the UN inspectors is of interest only to those who are in the business of inspecting and want to learn what worked and what didn’t. As far as having any relevance to the question of the administration’s miscalculations, it’s findings have been superceded by our own inspectors who found no weapons, no biological bogey men and no nuclear program. David Kay has said so but war supporters won’t stop complaining about the UN’s lack of action. That complaint is phoney because the UN inspectors were active until we ran them out.
His past actions mean that he needs to be watched, as we were already doing. I don’t think it justified starting a preemptive war costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars.
Fair enough. I can respect that opinion. I disagree.
And speaking of miscalculations, here’s L. Paul Bremer’s take on the adequacy of troop levels in Iraq.
It looks like General Shinseki retired early for voicing the same opinion. Bremer waited until he was out of danger.
GW’s folly looks like it will be a valuable case study on how not to plan and conduct a complex and serious operation. It can fall in line with the business operations that GW has bungled over the years.
From the site: "Prior to the war, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, said publicly that he thought the invasion plan lacked sufficient manpower, and he was slapped down by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership for saying so. During the war, concerns about troop strength expressed by retired generals also provoked angry denunciations by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In April 2003, for example, Rumsfeld commented, ‘People were saying that the plan was terrible and there weren’t enough people and … there were going to be, you know, tens of thousands of casualties, and it was going to take forever.’ After Baghdad fell, Rumsfeld then dismissed reports of widespread looting and chaos as ‘untidy’ signs of newfound freedom that were exaggerated by the media. Rumsfeld and Bush resisted calls for more troops, saying that what was going on in Iraq was not a war but simply the desperate actions of Baathist loyalists."
I guess Rumsfeld meant that now there was freedom to protest our presence with explosives. He was right in one thing, though. It certainly is untidy.
What continues to amaze me is that there are people who still think that the administration has done a good job and want to continue their power.
What nations got invaded due to Jimmy’s lustful heart? 
I was referring to a legal comparison between Jimmy Carter and Saddam Hussein’s actions as leaders…
We are a belligerent country with a past history of attacking and weakening other governments(eg South America…the Kissinger stuff minimum, all the way back to the Phillipines), we possess a large stockpile of WMDs, and have used said WMDs, and would be very angry if UN inspection teams had been spying for the another country, rather than inspecting for the UN. We are among the least cooperative of major governments and have an extensive history of meddling with other govenments stability. Our leadership changes often and does not have the best record of keeping to international accords and agreements.
Our so called ‘democracy’ does not meet the minimum standards for fair elections called for by the NGO’s and is not moving in that direction particularly. What precisely would be the legal difference between Carter and Hussein’s action?
Have you seen a trascript of that statement? I haven’t found one yet. Bremer seems to discount some of the characterizations of his comments later in the article.
Can we not go over this ground again? Shinseki’s comments were made more off the cuff than has been alleged, and at the time he deffered to other decision makers in the Pentagon. Meanwhile, his retirement had been anounced months before those comments were made. There is no case whatsoever to be made that he was fired for those comments nor for the notion that the administration ignored his ideas.
Allow me to ignore the America we hate thee crap and just concentrate on this.
For starters, Carter was not in a state of war with anyone. He was not under an agreement imposed on him by the international community and America individually to cooperate in his own disarmament.
You know what, on second thought, let me ignore the whole thing. You want to suggest that America is on a par legally with the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein? Fine, we will agree that we have no common grounds for a discussion.
Do you have a cite for this, e.g. the inspectors saying they were unable to progress because Saddam wouldn’t let them see something they needed to see?
Thing is, it wasn’t invisible a few years ago. We looked in the closet a few years ago and destroyed a few monsters. Now someone is claiming we have to blow up the closet because we can’t be sure there isn’t still an invisible monster inside.
While it’s possible that the monster learned how to turn invisible, it’s more likely that by cleaning out the closet a few years ago and leaving the light on, we prevented any more from entering.
All I said was Saddam was accepting the inspections before he found out UNSCOM was being used as American military intelligence.
I will say now that UNSCOM shouldn’t have been collecting information for that purpose; they were there to look for weapons and they should’ve stuck to it. The spying didn’t invalidate their work, but it explains why Saddam didn’t want inspectors coming back and poking around sensitive sites - they have this saying in Iraq… well, Iran… probably have it in Iraq too… 
I would’ve made sure the new inspection team was composed of members from countries that hadn’t participated in the previous spying, and that they were paid by (and they reported to) the UN, not their individual countries.
I read the Bremmer statement later in the article as being added comments and clarifications. It is strange that people who claim to be speaking the honest-to-God truth have to issue so many corrections and clarifications. Bremmer was giving a prepared speech and should have had plenty of advance preparation time to say exactly what he wanted to say. Now he comes back and says that he didn’t?
I know that Rummy says that Shinseki’s retirement was long planned. Didn’t he also say there was no doubt that Iraq had biological and nuclear weapons? Chief’s of Staff rarely make “off the cuff” public comments on military planning and force levels.
I’m shouldn’t be surprised at the persistence of apologists for the gang that can’t shoot straight, but I sometime am.
You don’t have to equate America with the Baathist regime in order to recognize that our pretensions to virtue are open to skepticism. We have a history of direct support for some of the most brutal authoritarian regimes to fester on the Earth. You don’t like it, neither do I. I am not willing to pretend otherwise, YMMV.
But the world at large is well aware of these truths, and we invite their contempt to pretend to some purity of intent and action unless we can show some clear division, some sea change in our policies and intentions. We might well start with some expression of regret, some recognition of culpability. I am not aware of any such to date.
Recent virtue, like new wine, sets the teeth on edge.
Oh, the gang shoots straight enough, Dave. Its the process of selecting targets that is dubious.
I had in mind the “shooting straight” as in the phrase “a real straight shooter.”
Why none of course. If we’re willing to conquer Iraq over Saddam’s inner lusting for WMD’s, we’re applying a tougher standard than God himself. That seems a trifle presumptuous of us, no?
Say…what??? Did I just here Edwards say that we acted unilaterally on Iraq, but we ceeded dealing with Iran to Europe??? Anyone else reading this the way I am?? That was an…odd…thing for him to state IMO.
-XT
At least he said it in the right debate!
lol :smack:
Just because I disagree with American policy decisions of the past and feel that we need to maintain a state of legal equality from which to make decisions does not mean that I hate America. I feel we should be able to frankly discuss the issues our country faces without the charge of hating America. I believe the country has many wonderful aspects, and some less than savory ones. I believe that we can not simply say that as Americans we should be able to step around treaties we have signed(ABM etc) while attacking other countries… at the very least frank speaking Americans should be able to discuss it without being labeled disloyal or hating America. However if you choose to limit your discussions of ideas to things that can not question the merit, history or foreign perspective of American actions, I can not stop you. I feel the best democracy we can have would be open to such actions, and that if no other reason than to tell me my errors, you should respond.
I also meant that to many people the American national history looks quite bad, and we need to be able to respond and justify what is different in the case of war in Iraq. Why is this more pressing than these other incidences? and why should we be able to decide the fate of a foreign country while not even allowing for the International Criminal Court to have jurisdiction over us. This is a bit more dramatic than a leader being brought to trial over past crimes… Is there a legal reason? Is there an ethical reason? Is there a national security reason? What makes the controversy over WMDs and the reasoning for the Iraq war different than the actions of Kissinger or the violations of ABM or our various semi-illegal actions as a major world power?
He issued clarification because his remarks were not reporduced in context. Are you saying that they were?
Well, they do when Senetors press them for such remarks. But just for the record, Shinseki’s retirment had been anounced in the press long before the remarks in question. He and Rumsfeld had tangled over changes Rumsfeld wanted to make in the Army which Shinseki objected to. Seriously, I am having enough trouble looking up cites for the other parts of this thread. Can we agree not to agree on this?
And yet, you are willing to suggest that Saddam’s allowing inspectors to return only after a significant threat of invasion amounts to complete innocence on his part. Odd, that.
I would like to believe that. I think a complete rehashing of American foriegn policy history is beyond the scope of this thread. I certainly believe that America has committed bad deeds in the past. but to say “We are a belligerent country with a past history of attacking and weakening other governments” in comparison to Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime is a comparison beyond the pale. Have we done anything bad in the past? Surely. Have we done anything comparible to the actions of Saddam Hussein in the time he has been in power? Hardly.
I don’t call people America haters (or any kind of haters) simply because they disagree with something. But if you want to discuss something as complex as the history of American foriegn policy, we need to find a common framework within which to do so. We don’t have to be Love it or leave it, but we can’t be everything is equal either.
Fair enough?
Will this do? Chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix said on Thursday that although Iraq had left unanswered many questions about its unconventional weapons one should not assume such dangerous arms still existed.
I’m obviously not claiming that Blix agrees with me. He clearly thought the inspection program could find enough of Saddam’s WMD activity to keep the world safe. But this comment does indicate that Saddam was being less than cooperative. Which was all I was trying to say.
Yes it was. Remember before the first Gulf war Saddam was supposed to be 10 years away from developing nukes. After that war, we found that he was in fact only a year or 2 away. After this war, as well, we found many things that Saddam had hidden from us. The monster was perhaps smaller than before, but still had some stealth capability.
No, he was not. I’m talking about the inspections of the middle 90s. Saddam accepted the inspectors in the early 90s because he had to. Almost imediately, he began to play games intended to hide things from them. By 97 the games had become a serious problem.
This is the text of the UNSCOM experience in Iraq in the early and mid 90s. The current crisis [October 1998]is the latest in a long series. Cumulatively, these crises suggest that Saddam Hussein has followed a long-term strategy of trying to conceal at least some elements of his capabilities in weapons of mass destruction since he signed agreements to dismantle these programmes. As each crisis has unfolded Iraq has backed down when it became clear that the international community was prepared to use force. However, the overall pattern has been that each crisis has worn down the world’s readiness to impose its will on Iraq. Saddam has also won important concessions from UNSCOM in terms of its operating procedures.
It would be nice to conclude that Saddam was cooperating and only balked when naughty CIA agents infiltrated the UNSCOM inpectors. But the fact is that Saddam was blocking the inspectors all along. CIA spying was only an excuse. Even if it did occur, it was only the lates in excuses he used to try and get out from under the inspections without ever cooperating with them.
BTW, what saying?