Well aren’t we logical. :rolleyes:
That is a bit like me changing my opposition to the war because your arguments against it are so blindingly idiotic, despite my being against it for totally different reasons.
That should come as a surprise to the 81% of the British public currently against action without a fresh UN mandate based on actual evidence, not to mention members of his Cabinet who’d resign immediately and the Parliamentary revolt what would see the end of Blair as PM. Absolutely no question; No evidence, no UN. No UN, no UK – unless Blair really has lost the plot.
What he is doing is playing a game of brinkmanship in which he’s increasingly finding himself painted into a corner by the determination of the US administration.
Interestingly, Blair also has to watch his back - he can’t afford to upset his Party or Gordon Brown will be in like Flynn. Blair is being squeezed a little on all sides just at the moment.
Fang - I’m not ‘attacking’ the poster, but the inconsistency – if you want to be mean, duplicity - of his views on UN Resolutions. Which, call me old fashioned, seems a fairly valid debating technique (one that, as them thar lawyers say, ‘….goes to credibility, M’lord’). I’m afraid you rather lost me on the rest……
Hey, why’d you leave out the Bushes and the Gores?
That may be, but december’s inconsistency in supporting this UN res and not others does not affect the merit of the claim that international policy should be determined by UN resolutions. “Credibility” is not a factor, unless you are charging that december is not being accurate in his claim of the requirements of 1441.
Forget the rest of my prior post, that was my piss-poor attempt at providing another example of ad hominem argumentation with some relevance to the discussion.
Blair has publicly committed to supporting a US war against Iraq, even without the Security Council:
Why are you still talking about “no evidence”? Considerable evidence of Iraq’s WMDs has already been made public: Iraq’s dishonest 1100-page statement, the chemical rockets, the nuclear information found in a scientist’s home, and, most of all, their failure to account for large amounts of WMDs that they were already known to possess.
From your [AP via Yahoo News] link, December:
"Blair told lawmakers in the House of Commons that Britain “would support (military action) in circumstances of a second U.N. resolution, and we would support it … where it was clear there was a breach by Saddam and there was an unreasonable blockage of a Security Council resolution.”
We can trade Blair quotes all day and night – the man is as slippery as an experienced Barrister should be. It doesn’t, however, actually matter what he says - normally I’d say don’t worry about what he says, see what he actually does - but, in this case, what he does is wholly dependent (sanity prevailing) on the mood of the people, his Cabinet and his (wider) parliamentary party. And none of those three are for turning – they ain’t having it unless there is evidence.
In short, Blair cannot commit UK forces without either showing proof or he achieves the most remarkable persuasion job on the British people since QE1 at Tilbury else he loses his job to Gordon Brown. IMHO.
Do you mean those 1989 empty shells (WW1 technology), the documents readily available on the Internet and the WMD Iraq absolutely has but no one can locate ?
Get a grip and stop wanking yourself stupid over a glimpse of ankle.
Blair is walking a tough road, but that’s called leadership. He believes that the U.S. is right, and he’s staking his career on it. So is George Bush.
And the stakes couldn’t be higher - If this war goes badly, Blair and Bush are done. Finished.
However, if they are right, and this war happens without the support of France and Germany, and it goes cleanly, and WMD are found, and a stable, pro-western government is installed in Iraq, then Tony Blair will have elevated his country to near-superpower status. Britain will be in a position second only to the United States in terms of wielding power in the world.
In the meantime, Germany and France are marginalizing themselves. If they manage to stop this war, and it turns out that all you anti-war types are right and Saddam just wants to have a Coke and live in peace and harmony with the world, then they’ll just embolden their anti-U.S. constituencies, and further distance themselves from the U.S. and Britain. And if they DON’T manage to stop the war and it turns out well, those two governments are in for a diplomatic ass-kicking. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Japan and India on the Security Council, and France out in the cold.
The stakes are so high that it makes me wonder if the reason France and Germany aren’t supporting a war is because they are afraid of what the U.S. will discover once it starts going through Iraq’s internal documentation. I suspect we’ll find plenty of evidence that France at least violated the sanctions on numerous occasions. And if there is evidence that France or Germany supplied prohibited weaponry or technologiy, there’s going to be hell to pay.
I just love the hypocrisy going on in this thread. Bush declares that the U.S. will go after Iraq without the U.N. if need be, and you guys tear him apart for being a unilateralist. But then France comes out and unilaterally declares that it will veto a second resolution (after agreeing that they wouldn’t), and we all know the reason is because of OIL, and all you guys can say is, “They’re looking after their interests - as they should”. So I guess unilateralism is only bad when the United States engages in it?
It’s too bad though - France would have been useful. They could have invaded from the North, and then tied up Iraq’s army by staging a mass surrender.
As for those European countries supporting Bush, you can add Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and almost every other country in that sphere.
I like your rhetoric, LC. But, you do agree that those shells violate the UN resolution, don’t you? They are counted as prohibited WMDs and they were not in Iraq’s declaration.
The point is, we are beyond “no evidence.” You can argue, “not enough evidence” if you like.
Titter. Good post.
Sam, how do you change the membership of the Security Council, especially permanent member status? Japan and India?
Rockets, and you mean WWII. They are 122 mm unguided Katyusha rockets, range approx. 20 K, up to 40. They were high technology in WWII.
I should have been clearer in my last message.
You don’t kick France off the Security Council. As you say, they have permanent member status. But what you CAN do is an end-around. Make the SC irrelevant by simply creating another institution and ignoring what the SC has to say. This is the big danger to the U.N. - if it goes from being waffling and ineffective to being actively oppositional to the interests of the United States, then the United States will work to undermine the U.N. And Britain will go along with it.
I can see a new alliance building now - The U.S., Britain, Israel, most of Eastern Europe (including Russia, which is also a pain the U.S.'s side, but too powerful to ignore because of all those nukes), Japan, Australia, probably Canada, India, etc.
And I think you’ll see a flood of other countries moving into that sphere as well - countries which see the direction the wind is blowing, and jump on board. Pakistan, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc.
If the U.N. really screws the pooch on this, I can see this happening, and it’ll be orchestrated by the U.S. And that means a fundamental re-alignment of power. Those countries that are continually anti-U.S. (i.e. France and Germany) are going to be marginalized.
As for Britain being ‘second in power to the U.S.’, I didn’t mean militarily necessarily. Russia and China and India are very powerful. But I meant powerful in the sense that they will be closest to the U.S., and best able to manipulate U.S. policy in a direction that favors them.
Beagle - Okay, WW!, WW2 …hey, what’s 25 years between friends !! Actually, if you look at the bare bones; 20 miles max, delivering chemicals …it sounds like WW1 tech to me (Big Bertha, mustard gas shells…). But I’m far from expert. Anyway…
You know december, way back when I was a law student it was possible that a defendant could ‘hang themselves’ if enough strands of circumstantial evidence bonded together for the jury to be convinced ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’. It meant that no single piece of evidence was sufficient or convincing but that, together, a strong enough rope could be twined.
Never liked it. Always seemed to me that either you’ve got the (so called) ‘Adlia Stevenson’ moment or you ain’t. Whatever we think and whatever legal (or other) analogies we care to employ, the UN (France, China and Russia) isn’t going to be convinced without something fat and juicy.
Another thing I remember from those days is how easy it was – this is during the Discovery stage of litigation – for a party to not include something it should, by mistake. This happened fairly often and was later corrected with an apology and a raised eyebrow from the judge. It happens, perhaps especially when you’ve an entire military taking stock – not everyone is as diligent as they might be. I’m not saying it was definitely ‘human error’ but a dozen old shells at an ammo dump are hardly big potatoes in the whole scheme of things. I thought we were looking for state of the art labs breeding monsters with seven heads and all that kind of malarkey ?
To not include 12 or 13 shells at an ammunition dump from one of those howitzer / ‘Stalin Organs’ / rocket thingies circa 1989 is not, in my humble opinion, the end of the world. Yet.
I have to agree with Sam Stone’s points about leadership and high stakes. Whether you agree with what they’re up to or not (and I think Blair and Bush have pretty different motivations and agenda’s here), they have got the weapons inspectors back in, Saddam is bent over a barrel with his bottom greased and we will know what he’s been up to soon enough, if anything. That is progress.
Also, I haven’t seen anything played for these kind of stakes in my lifetime – this is not the Cuban missile crisis but it’s bloody serious, complicated stuff for which Blair and Bush have stepped forward……this hasn’t been foisted upon them.
I’m not knocking WWI technology. The Paris Gun was quite an accomplishment. I’m surprised the Iraqis never tried to build a huge artillery piece to shoot at its neighbors. Oh, wait…
If I understand your logic, your defense is that Iraq overlooked these 16 shells because they had so many other prohibited WMDs. Why is that good? :dubious:
Or, looked at another way, Iraq’s declaration said they had no prohibited WMDs at all. If these missiles were the only ones, they would not have been overlooked.
Look, get practical for a minute. An entire military is required to take stock of its munitions right down to individual 13 year-old shells. You’ve got a whole bunch of lackeys running around with clip boards jotting down what’s pointed out by some other lackeys………these are not missile silos, they’re rounds of old ammo – still dangerous, yep, but not enough. It’s shells with a 20 mile max range, the only thing you can hit with those is Bagdad !
…unless you still have Beagle’s Mother of all Guns. Holy cow. Forgot about those little babes. I liked these bits from your link:
“It was meant for long-range attack and also to blind spy satellites. Our scientists were seriously working on that. It was designed to explode a shell in space that would have sprayed a sticky material on the satellite and blinded it.
He also said the supergun could have delivered a nuclear device”
- oh yeah, he almost forgot that last bit !
I also noticed Bull was assassinated in 1990. Fancy that !
They weren’t overlooked, though. That’s the assumption many people are making, but from what I understand the facility they were found in was built after the 1994 agreement, which means those warheads were moved there long after Iraq said that they no longer had them. Unless you want to believe that no one looked in the boxes, they clearly knew they were in possession of those weapons. And that means they intentionally left them out of their declaration to the U.N.
Doesn’t it bother any of you anti-war guys that your hero Colin Powell is now saying that he’s fed up with the U.N. and fully supports Bush’s policy? Apparently, the administration is now united over this issue to a very high degree.
Then there’s This Editorial by Condoleeza Rice, where she compares a nation that voluntarily disarms, and what that looks like, with Iraq. Seems like a fairly compelling logical argument to me.
Then there’s This information from Paul Wolfowitz. He says that the U.S. has intelligence from ‘multiple corroborating sources’ that Saddam has threatened death for any scientists who agree to interviews with the U.N. inspectors, along with death for their families. And Wolfowitz also says that Iraqi intelligence agents are posing as scientists.
Now, I know some of you are going to say that Wolfowitz is lying. But for the sake of discussion, let’s say that he’s telling the truth, and Saddam is really doing this. Is this enough evidence for you?
But if it’s not, I don’t think you’ll have long to wait. I suspect that the U.S. will start leaking intelligence daily leading up to Bush’s State of the Union address. Monday and Tuesday will be very interesting.
Fine. Here are some excerpts from a speech by Paul Wolfowitz that lays out the reality.
The reality is, it ain’t a weapon of mass destruction if it only flies 20 sodding miles !
What’s to mass destruct, the desert ?
Ooh, goody! If you get to cite Wolfowitz as “reality,” I guess you won’t mind if I cite Noam Chomsky as reality, right?
** december **, talking seriously now, do you, personally, ever doubt the information that the administration publishes?
Did you feel the same way in the Nixon years?
So, Sam, tell us - now that the aluminum tubes you’ve been hyperventilating about have gone the way of the Prague meeting that didn’t happen, and the IAEA report that didn’t exist, what “known facts” are you going to use as a casus belli? Or are you now up to saying that the US military will find something that the UN inspectors will not? Because that’s what the warmongering platform comes to now, at its best.
Which leaves the issue: If the US knows something now that the UN doesn’t, why isn’t it sharing? Not even “Um, guys, look over there instead of here”? If there really is something Bush is holding back as a gotcha, that is going to be pretty transparent. The only other possibility is that the US doesn’t have any facts they can mention as a plausible cause, after 10 years of surveillance and regular air strikes there.
You seem to be under the impression, btw, that the UN is somehow alienated from the self-perceived national interests of its members, and is simply restraining them from what they want to do. I see no factual basis for your belief (once again) that dismissing it and making a new organization, one more like the American Empire you pine for, would matter one whit.
Interesting discussion about the nature of national leadership - you and London Calling both seem to be saying that it can include blustering for long enough to maybe get lucky and be bailed out. Maybe that will happen, but don’t count on it.
Here’s the text of a White House paper called, “What Does Disarmament Look Like?” It’s too detailed to summarize adquequately, so please read it. Then, you will know the entire allegations that you wish to disbelieve. Particulary, please read the entire section entitled “Iraqi Non-cooperation.” A few quotes
[quote]
[ul][li]Iraq’s concealment activities are run by the Special Security Organization (SSO), under the control of Qusay Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein’s son.[]The National Monitoring Directorate – whose stated function is to facilitate inspections – actually serves as an “anti-inspections” organization[]Thousands of personnel from Iraqi security agencies provide manpower for hiding documents and materiel from inspectors, policing inspection sites, and monitoring the inspectors’ activities.[]Iraq’s declaration is not “currently accurate, full, and complete.” It is inaccurate and incomplete[]The UN Special Commission concluded that Iraq did not verifiably account for, at a minimum, 2160kg of growth media. This is enough to produce 26,000 liters of anthrax – 3 times the amount Iraq declared; 1200 liters of botulinum toxin; and, 2200 liters of aflatoxin, a carcinogen.[]Dr. Blix has cited 13 recent Iraqi missile tests which exceed the 150km limit.[]In 1999, UN Special Commission and international experts concluded that Iraq needed to provide additional, credible information about VX production. UNSCOM concluded that Iraq had not accounted for 1.5 tons of VX, a powerful nerve agent. Former UNSCOM head Richard Butler wrote that “a missile warhead of the type Iraq has made and used can hold some 140 liters of VX . . . A single such warhead would contain enough of the chemical to kill up to 1 million people.”[/ul][/li][/quote]
This is just a partial list. There’s more there.
nogginhead, would you claim that the United States, Hans Blix, Richard Butler, the UN Special Commission and international experts are all lying?