You done whooshed yerself, Der. Nose grows when he tells the truth. Its the Old Switcheroo.
(Dumbass Trotskyists. Sheeesh!)
Congratulations. An assertion of such unsupportability by facts and just general non-informedness is truly a marvel.
Let me simply say that satellite imagery is being used to find mass graves in Iraq. Cite.
Do you expect anyone to believe that our satellites are somehow capable of discovering hidden mass graves, but incapable of discovering massive caches of WMD that were somehow secretly buried during the war while every goddamn square inch of Iraq was being photographed from space?
Did you read any of the articles on this news event? Like this? They don’t say that “Iraqis would be busy terrorizing other countries, but unfortunately, the war in Iraq has made them want to terrorize the US instead.” It does not say that. What it does say is that the war in Iraq “has spawned a new generation of terrorists.” As in, the war has inspired people to pick up arms and threaten us.
So, if we stay and bleed, gas will someday get cheaper in the US? How many lives will it take to lower the cost of gas by 50 cents? Because as far as I can tell, we’ve lost nearly 2,700 Americans there and the cost of a gallon of 87 has gone up 50 percent since the time we invaded.
At least we agree Hussein had them. Hussien had plenty of time to get rid of them before we arrived. The real question is, where did they go? One thing is for certian, Hussein will never have them again.
Precisely. He tells the truth, his nose gets bigger. He lies, it gets smaller; thus my inverted nose comment. Methinks the whooshing is on your part.
Long, long before the invasion; by the time that came around, any he had had decayed to uselessness, or been destroyed by the UN.
Why bother hiding junk ? For that matter, if he had them why didn’t he use them ?
[Rod Serling]The . . . Twilight Zone.[/Rod Serling]
No; his successor will, Iran will . . . in fact, most of the planet will, and they’ll point them at us. That’s the real lesson of this war; you should be ready to threaten America with mass death at all times, because massive brute force is all we understand.
So you’re against the people of Iraq getting a chance to experience a democracy?
Don’t act like things were not accomplished in Iraq. Hussien is gone. To leave now would encourage thug like groups to take control. The newly elected Iraqi government is not ready to stand on its own yet. Let’s not create another Lebanon situation where the country becomes infiltrated and run by goons.
There’s something odd about this National Intelligence Estimate popping up full fledged just now. We know it was completed in April 2006, and that Democratic leaders called on Negroponte for an updated NIE in late July:
So they were clearly left in the dark about the existence of this thing. In early August, possibly in response to Dem pressure, Negroponte ordered an updated National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, saying the NIE would be completed “shortly.”
Obviously, Negroponte knew of the existence of the April NIE, so what’s with promising a new one “shortly”? Was he trying to completely cover up the existence of the April NIE and quicky-prep a new one more to his liking? It’s difficult to imagine any less damning hypothesis that still covers the facts here.
Too late. Is government-sponsored torture a part of the “freedom agenda?”
What democracy ? Anarchy in the streets and low-level civil war isn’t democracy, nor is a puppet government.
Sure; lots of Iraqis are dead, crippled and injured; religious fanaticism is taking over what used to be a secular culture; the economy and infrastructure are wrecked; what passes for a government is a joke; and we have ignited hatred that will burn for generations. A hundred years from now, they will despise us.
Big deal; he’d be an improvement.
They are in control.
And it never will be. As collaborators, they are walking dead men. When we leave, now or years from now, they die.
Too late; that happened the moment we crossed the border.
And Hillary Clinton’s Gynecologist proves to be yet another who claims there still could have been WMDs at the time of invasion, and completely ignores the question as to why Bush has stated that there were none.
I don’t mean to go off topic, but do you have a cite for this please? I ask because it goes against what I understood to have happened. For example, most of the articles I read on the subject suggested that Qaddafi’s decision was a shocking reversal of his prior stance. And here’s an article in the Scotsman suggesting that he agreed to allow inspections the day after he said he was dismantling his weapons program (in 2003)
Plus, this globalsecurity.org article suggests that Libyans were professing that they weren’t pursuing nukes, but were still operating a covert nuke program:
Obviously, if I’m wrong or misunderstanding, I’d appreciate a clarification.
There are certainly indications that the cooperation we received from some Middle Eastern countries was not solely the result of goodwill.
There are political reasons that he could be lying now, so I’d take this with a grain of salt. But it’s worth considering.
Just based on the username he chose, its clear that **Hillary Clinton’s Gynecologist ** has no axe to grind, and is as non-partisan as they come.
Or . . . maybe he *is * her gynecologist ! :eek:
Let’s not go overboard, now. BobLibDem’s name doesn’t exactly speak of a neutral worldview, but he’s no partisan automaton.
If you have something to add to the debate, obviously, you should do so. But attacking someone’s username isn’t really GD material.
Indeed…And, at the time that he was making and using them, what did we do? We supplied him with the necessary materials and the intelligence reports that allowed him to use them most effectively against Iran. (See also here.)
While there is no doubt that Saddam may have been pretty cagey at times to keep people guessing, I don’t believe it is in fact true that he was denying the weapons inspectors access to facilities in the lead-up to the war in 2003. The inspectors were getting quite unfettered access. I believe that the biggest complaint the inspectors had was an inability of Iraq to produce solid documentary evidence of having destroyed all of the WMDs that they had had but claimed to have destroyed. Of course, we never found the WMDs or, as far as I know, the documentary evidence, which means that this may have been the first war started over bad record-keeping. (And, by the way, while it was hard for the inspectors to show a negative…i.e., that Saddam did not have WMD, they were learning that U.S. intelligence about where Saddam had WMD was garbage.)
[It is true that Saddam had been obstructing the weapons inspectors in their work back in the late 90s, which culminated in them being pulled out by the U.N. and the U.S. and Britain launching some bombing runs. At the time, Saddam’s claim that some of the inspectors were acting as spies for the U.S. and Britain was generally dismissed as an excuse, but was subsequently found to be true. (Hans Blix acknowledged as much on a “Fresh Air” interview with Terry Gross.)
Back on the OP’s main topic, it is nice to see that the U.S. intelligence professionals are acknowledging a fact that has been obvious to a lot of us for a long time.
Actually the OP is about reports of an intelligence community consensus that the war in Iraq has mde us less safe by increasing the number of individual terrorists. It is not about the origins of the war or about Libya or any of that. It is irrelevant that Libya renounced its weapons program and state support of terrorism. Individual Libyans and those from other countries can be or are being radicalized into terrorism which is the reported gist of the intelligence report. It rather hollows out the meat behind GW’s claim that we should reelect Republicans this fall because he is stronger on antiterrorism and needs a Republican congress to support his program.
The question is not one of defending Hussein. Some of us knew he was a bad guy at the time when Rummy was still shaking his hand and providing him with support as he gassed the Kurds and the Iranians. However, the question is whether it was in our best interest…or even the best interests of the Iraqis…to invade Iraq rather than continue on our course of containment. I think it is pretty clear, as the intelligence assessment seems to admit, that invading Iraq was not in our best interest…even if you don’t count the ~$300 billion (and counting) spent and the thousands of American soldiers killed and wounded. While technically speaking, one could argue that the jury is still out on whether it is in the best interest of the Iraqis, what we can say at this point is that they have paid quite a large price and have yet to receive very many apparent gains.
Others have pointed out that the cause-and-effect here is questionable to say the least, particularly in the case of Libya, who was moving in this direction prior to the Iraq war. Furthermore, you are conveniently ignoring other headlines: Iranians have elected a much more hardline government that is proceeding with a nuclear program and making threatening noises at Israel, North Korea is pursuing nukes at full-speed-ahead and claims to have them already (although they may be lying) and the Isreali-Palestinian-Lebanon situation seems to be going from bad-to-worse.
I don’t seem to recall hearing a whole lot about Iraqi-born or trained terrorists hitting the U.S. or anywhere else in the world…which suggests that your notion that there are a finite number of bad guys in the world and if we just occupy them in one place they can’t bother us somewhere else is simplistic in the extreme.
There will always be a few bad guys like Osama around. But, the real question becomes whether they end up being marginalized and unable to recruit many new conscripts or whether they end up being heroes and having more people willing to fight and die for them than they probably have the resources to train. My bets are on Iraq making the latter more true than the former. And, it seems from what we are hearing about the classified intelligence assessment that U.S. intelligence analysts agree to at least some degree.
Does anybody have a link to these reports or a news article discussing them?
A statement which can be refuted with evidence from right here in the USA. Hopefully, no one here needs a cite for the plentiful hate-instructed ignorance so easily found in this democratic nation?
By the way, one of the right-leaning arguments I’ve read about the NIE today says that terrorists were obviously on the increase anyway prior to 9/11, and if we hadn’t invaded Iraq, there would be even more terrorists in the world than there are now, so this report actually proves that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea!
Link? Here’s The AOL Reprint of the NYT article about the still-classified (darn leakers!) April NIE that apparently states that the Iraq war has created more terrorists than have been captured or killed since the inital invasion.
Here is one brief recounting on events with Libya, from a briefing earlier this year by C. David Welch, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs:
So, while Libya may not have announced a decision to dismantle their WMD programs until after we had invaded Iraq, it was clear that they were on the road toward taking a more positive role in the world community since the late 1990s. Libya, by the way, was apparently not very close to obtaining actually developing a nuclear weapon:
and here: