Am I the only doper who thinks Magiver’s been spending a little too much time listening to conservative talk radio?
Somehow I think your username is strangely apt.
Do you have a citation for this? The National Inteligence Estimate prepared by the American Intelligence Community says otherwise. Maybe you have better sources than US’s Intel Community? If you do, you should share them with uis, and of course the CIA.
**Central Intelligence Agency**
October 7, 2002
Dear Mr. Chairman:
In response to your letter of 4 October 2002…
Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States.
Should Saddam conclude that a US-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq’s unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or CBW.
Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.
Regarding the 2 October closed hearing, we can declassify the following dialogue:
Senator Levin: . . . If (Saddam) didn’t feel threatened, did not feel threatened, is it likely that he would initiate an attack using a weapon of mass destruction?
Senior Intelligence Witness: . . . My judgment would be that the probability of him initiating an attack–let me put a time frame on it–in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low.
Senator Levin: Now if he did initiate an attack you’ve . . . indicated he would probably attempt clandestine attacks against us . . . But what about his use of weapons of mass destruction? If we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis or otherwise, what’s the likelihood in response to our attack that he would use chemical or biological weapons?
Senior Intelligence Witness: Pretty high, in my view.
Do you have a good citation for that? Colin Powell’s on record saying that Iraq wasn’t a threat to its neighbors and Condoleeza Rice on record saying that Hussein was deterrable.
Do you have citation for this? You do know that the mobile bio-weaqpons labs thing was a ‘fabrication’ by an informant supplied by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, (possibly supplied at the behest of Iranian espionage services), who was known to the DIA be a fabricator for two years before the Bush Admin started using the mobile bio-weapons lab story, right?
What, a portable nuclear power plant?
Umm. Bull Shit. Do you have any citation for these being ‘easily built’ and not 'high tech’items?
Cite for this bullshit too, please. Show that Hussein could process uranium or hire some to do so ‘on site.’
What wasn’t? Are you asserting that Hussein had enriched some uranium somewhere outside of Iraq? Could you please be so kind as to present a citation for this bull shit too?
And another call for a citation on what appears to be bullshit you’ve pulled out of thin air. I’d especially like to see the citation for nerve gas facilities being easily rendered mobile.
You could read the Kay report which said that the sanctions effectively limited, signifigant ‘WMD program activities’.
The extent of the nuclear ‘program’ discovered by Kay was that there were some scientists who suspected another scientists of considering making plans to restart a nuclear program.
But not much of one to the US.
Do you have a citation for this bullshit about Hussein being a nuclear threat?
Actually most nations in the region already experience ‘self rule.’ Colonialism went out of fashion last century.
Do you have citation for this further bullshit? Since you don’t seem to’ve noticed the al-Sistani guy who’s been calling for democratic elections for months and months now is often referred to as ‘cleric.’
Iran already has a democracy.
Sure doesn’t seem like you know what the fuck you’re talking about.
Do you have some relibale citations?
Well, too be fair, your post made it clear that you’ve been browsing the liberal-party-line section of the library. (Obviously you haven’t been listening to liberal talk radio, because no one has.) Your analysis of the first Gulf War motivations wasn’t exactly bias free, as anyone who took the time to check your cites would find out.
If you follow the recent news, you might know that the recent evidence is more that Iran (and my own guess is the hardliners in Iran) used the U.S. to do the dirty work of eliminating their worst enemy and perhaps allowing for the rise of another Shiite-dominated state in the region:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001935950_iranchalabi22.htm
Would you care to elaborate? I couldn’t even figure out which of SimonX’s cites you were talking about. His cite in this thread referred to the more recent Iraq war, I believe. Besides which, I seem to recall from other threads that (SimonX, please correct me if I am wrong) SimonX doesn’t consider himself to be a liberal but rather a disenchanted Republican…i.e., a Republican who doesn’t have nearly as high a threshhold for cognitive dissonance as many seem to have.
In fact, I was responding to rjung was giving us the official “The Bushes are evil” history of what we call the first Gulf War.
First, rjung’s interpretation of Ambassador’s Gillespie’s [sic] comments seem to be provably false (http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/1999/05/27/p23s3.htm). The U.S. was not giving Iraq * carte blanch * to invade Kuwait. We were pretty much saying that we had no opinion on the slant drilling issue one way or another.
The slant drilling charge itself doesn’t seem to have been proved, and was pretty much tacked on to a long list of other Iraqi complaints.
lambchop’s discussion of the issues seems pretty accurate – here’s another message board recap that seems reasonably unbiased (http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0211/0327.html) (but any interested reader should probably do their own research as there’s a lot of BS on both sides of the issue out there).
rjung’s contention that the first Gulf War was all a big US plot to grab oil while Saddam Hussein was just a big innocent puppy dog just doesn’t stand up to examination. Iraq’s army may not have been flinging children out of incubators, but they were wholly into the rape, kill, torture and pillage extracurricular activities.
I’m certain that many US foreign policy goals (bases in Saudi Arabia) were opportunistically met due to the Gulf War, but I’m far from being convinced that we planned it or instigated it.
I wear my bias proudly, unlike ClearChannel or Fox News. 
In any event, I was merely trying to correct the misperception in the earlier post, that the first Gulf War happened only because the evvvvvvvvvvvil Saddam Hussein woke up one morning, brushed his teeth, tortured a few prisoners, and decided to make megalomaniacal control of most of the world’s oil supplies his new summer project.
“Provably false” seems to be a stretch. Let’s revisit the sequence of events:
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Saddam Hussein has a list of grievances with Kuwait, real and imagined, and is considering a military response of some sort.
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Saddam talks to the US about his ideas. The US is noncommittal; while the US never gave Saddam carte blanc to invade, neither did it warn Saddam off the trail. To be generous, we’ll say the US was apathetic here.
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Saddam invades Kuwait. International response is harsh and negative.
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The US warns Saudi Arabia that Saddam is amassing troops on the Saudi border, and uses doctored photos of Iraqi troop buildup to augment its case.
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The Saudis are convinced that there is a threat, and allows the US to build airbases in KOSA.
I notice you haven’t refuted item #4. Would you agree with me that using falsified photos and lying about Iraqi troop buildup are things that an honest government would not do? And would you agree that item #5 serves the long-term US objective of establishing a permanent military presence in the Middle East, a goal which has now been reached with the troops currently in Iraq?
I don’t recall saying anything about oil, nor about Saddam was an innocent babe. I do think he was manipulated into invading Kuwait to give us a pretext for spooking the Saudis.
Somebody doctored those photos, and it wasn’t Chalabi…
IMHO, bias is something other than a deliberate mistatement of the facts. I’m aware that this is not a popular opinion.
Not to hijack this thread (which was already veering into hijack territory anyway), but IMO bias by itself is not a bad thing, as long as it’s something openly admitted to. It lets folks with similar views find companionship, and allows others to give more/less weight to your views accordingly.
The problem is with the deception of bias, of presenting slanted information and insisting it’s the unvarnished truth. At best, you are insulting the intelligence of your audience; at worst, it’s flat-out lying. Al Fanken and Michael Moore are just as biased as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, but at least Al and Mike tell you ahead of time where they’re coming from, and get a bit more respect from me as a result.
I was saying that teh Bush Administration they had every good reason, even flimsy but truthful reasons to go to war with Iraq when they had the chance and the support–but they chose to outright lie.
And by the way, terrorism is a world-wide street fight.
I am curious, do you have to offend all the catholic dopers (including me) in order to make a point?
rjung, you’ve trotted this canard out in countless threads and it’s getitng a little tiring. Understand that I am a staunch opponent of this current fiasco and the Bush administration in general, but your interpretation of the events of 1990 is ridiculously tainted:
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Iraq did not tell April Gillespie or anyone else what their actual plans were, and
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The U.S. not actually saying “We will kick your ass if you invade Kuwait” does not constitute indifference to the general issue of countries invading other countries. Has the U.S. formally communicated to Germany that it would be upset in Germany invaded Belgium again?
Cite?
Frankly, I find it difficult to believe the Saudis needed American intelligence to tell them if there was a threat or not. I find your theory that the U.S. manipulated Iraq into the invasion quite preposterous and unsupported by much in the way of evidence.
Question. How many people did Saddam kill vs the number of people who died in Bosnia? You can exclude Iranians and Kuwaitis.
Not taking sides on this perspective, just posing the question.
SimonX,
it serves no purpose to take every sentence I posted and attach the word “cite” to it. If you want to debate me than pick something and discuss it. It also serves no purpose to insult me but congratulations on your prolific use of the word “bullshit”.
As for your statement that Iran is a democracy I would disagree. Their last election(s) were rigged by “religious police” who disqualified candidates because they were deemed spiritually inadequate. A candidate could be disqualified for simply disagreeing with the current leader.
By all accounts available to the public, the United States (via James Baker, via April Gillespe) told Saddam Hussein that we weren’t taking sides in the Iraq-Kuwait dispute. How the heck was Saddam supposed to interpret that as “We will come down on you like a ton of bricks if you invade Kuwait,” pray tell?
Once more, with feeling:
The Saudis initially didn’t believe there was a threat either. The US had to drag out the doctored photos to make their case. That was my point.
What Glaspie (not Gillespie, I looked it up) said was that they had no position on the border dispute. That certainly does not constitute carte blanche to invade. Whether Hussein suspected the world would respond with force or not, the fact is that if you start unprovoked wars you are subject to reprisals.
Iraq, remember, was not concerned about this “slant drilling” bit as the major problem, as you’re trying to represent it as being. Iraq simply was on the verge of bankruptcy thanks to the Iran-Iraq War and wanted Kuwait to forgive billions in war debt.
At the meeting with Glaspie, Saddamn Hussein ended the discussion by placing a call to Hosni Mubarak, and then coming back to tell Glaspie that all was well, as bilateral talks had been planned with Kuwait. (They broke down.)
I don’t doubt that the failure to anticipate Iraqi intentions were an intelligence fuckup of the highest order, inasmuch as it should have been obvious that a dictator with his back to the wall will do something desperate, and Kuwait was there for the taking. Both sides erred enormously here, as is so often the case in war; the USA and the rest of the West failed to appreciate the seirousness of Hussein’s intentions. The Americans were relatively noncommittal in part because Kuwait asked them to be, fearing they’d provoke Iraq, and Hussein stupidly interpreted that, as well as U.S. trade policy, as constituting permission to wipe out Kuwait. But there is just no evidence at all that the USA tried to cause the invasion, and very substantial evidence that it came as a total surprise to the USA, as well as to everyone else.
First of all, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Allied intelligence overestimated Iraqi strength. Troop and strength estimates were changing and shifting right up until the day the US invaded. That’s a product of bad intel, not deliberate deception; U.S. officers complained that their intel was terrible. As the Great Scud Hunt showed, U.S. intelligence simply did not work very well.
As to the specific claim, are you seriously attempting to convince me that two Russian photos prove a thing? Umm, do you know how many photos would make up a photographic surveillance of that area?
Neither you nor I know how many photos were involved in selling the Iraqi troop buildup bogeyman to the Saudis – these are just the ones which have come to light.
in any event, why quibble over the details when the results are already known? Americans show doctored photos, Saudi Royal Family allow bases to be built, Muslem fundamentalists in Saudi get P.O.d at the presence of “infidels,” airplanes get flown into the World Trade Center…
It serves no purpose to post a series of assertions essential to your point(s) if you’ve nothing to back them up.
How is one to know that you are not mistaken and your assertions fabricated, baseless or otherwise flat out false? To be honest, on a number of points, (as noted above), I just don’t believe what you posted.
If you would please be so kind, could you possibly be troubled to let us all look at the evidence you have for the noted assertions that you’ve made?
Or is this a case of the ‘common sense’ citations?
If you can’t back up your assertions, then there’s not much of a debate is there?
If you can’t put up…
It is a republic. Get over it.
I’ve been round this bush with rjung before. He’s not willing to let the facts surrounding this issue have too much of an impact and he’s proud of it. He says he wears his ‘bias’ proudly.
IMHO, the deliberate misrepresentation facts has a different name than ‘bias.’