I’m sure the Bushistas will be along to shout “liberation!” any moment now. :rolleyes:
$250,000. Thats the bounty offered for anyone who can come forward and lead us to any one, just one, of the sites where massive amounts of WMD’s are being stored, or were stored, or were produced. A quarter of a million bucks. Just sitting there.
My experience of human nature leads me to believe that if one hundred people knew something, 99 of them would be lined up outside the nearest Army Intelligence tent right now.
What accounts for this anomaly? Iraqi’s don’t like money? Thier loyalty to Saddam exceeds all understanding? I have posted this question for almost a month now, and have yet to hear a plausible explanation.
To respond to the OP: about ten minutes after that reward/bribe/finder’s fee was offered. Pretty close to a month ago. And so far, nada. Absent the aforementioned plausible explanation for this extraordinary reticence, I say there’s nothing to sell.
We’ve been had.
I still believe weapons will be found, or facilities capable of making them in quantity (in which case the weapons themselves may have been destroyed by Hussein - if you have the capability to make as much as you want, you don’t need to keep the actual end product around as a ‘smoking gun’).
However, I must say I’m getting nervous. I agree with elucidator’s point above - in a poor, downtrodden country, you would expect the lure of $250,000 to bring forth all sorts of people.
Also, it does disturb me that the evidence presented before the war was portrayed as being above doubt, and showed very large complexes and large scale activity. Now it seems the hunt has turned into trying to track various flotsam and jetsam of a weapons program. That doesn’t really match MY expectations based on the evidence presented.
However, it’s still early. Saddam had a long period of time to hide his stuff. And he was a brutal man. Witnesses to the burial of WMD could have been killed to prevent them from spilling the beans. Witnesses who are left could be afraid to come forward for fear of being implicated and charged with war crimes. So the jury is still out.
As someone who was in favor of the war for reasons other than WMDs, it’s really irrelevant to me whether they are found or not from the standpoint of determining if it was a just war. Of course it was. Saddam was a tyrant who murdered millions, and was continuing to do so. His ouster was a good and just thing for the Iraqi people, and could be a catalyst for true middle east peace.
That said, if no WMDs are found, there should be a serious investigation. It is important to find out if, A) Bush lied to the people, in which case he should be impeached, B) The intelligence community lied to Bush, in which case a house cleaning is in order, C) The intelligence community was just wrong, in which case it needs to be reformed, or D) The weapons were there, but aren’t there any more, in which case it’s critically important to find out what happened to them.
Given that the U.N. itself believed the weapons were there, and Saddam’s behaviour was consistent with that, and that every major intelligence agency in the world believed the weapons to be there, then if if they aren’t found the most likely reason would be D) above.
Who are you, and what have you done with Sam Stone !? :eek:
Oh. There you are.
“if no WMDs are found, there should be a serious investigation”
Sam: But at what point in time would you start the investigation? 2 months, 6 months, a year, 2 years?
I guess when the administration runs out of credible places to search, and/or stops searching.
I think that issue will be taken care of for us. The obvious deadline would be the start of the next election campaign, say right after the Democratic primaries are over. The Democrats will stop fighting with each other, and go after Bush. At that point, if he hasn’t found WMD, there will be a lot of pressure on him. And if he was lied to, I would expect HIM to start an investigation, if for no other reason than to deflect the heat.
Sqeegee: I call it like I see it. If Bush was just lying, why did every other intelligence agency agree with him? Why did the Security Council vote unanimously to declare Saddam to be in material breach of prior resolutions? Why didn’t Saddam open up the country and stop the sanctions? The only thing that really fits the facts is that Saddam DID have weapons of mass destruction. The big question is, where are they?
And if they aren’t there, is it a failure of intelligence, a failure of leadership, or was Saddam clever enough to get rid of them? Those are important questions, and they need answers.
But I’d still say the odds are at least 75% that weapons will be found. That latest bio-lab looks like a good candidate for a ‘smoking gun’, but the jury is still out on it.
John, the entire “Deadline” bit is a red herring.
Let’s suppose we give the U.S. four months to find the weapons. Why are they not saying right now what that “secret evidence” was, anyway? This isn’t an all-or-nothing affair; let’s find out just what the pretext for invasion was, so that progress can be tracked. I would be happy to wait if they’d explain just what all this secret evidence was and why all these big facilities they claimed existed have turned up bupkus.
I mean, they had some evidence BEFORE the war, right? They said they did. Where’s that evidence? Granted, some of that evidence turned out to be lies, but how about the rest of it? The U.S. didn’t say anything before the war about “mobile labs” and rickety trailers. They weres claiming they had solid evidence of large facilities, production programs, sarin and VX factories, weapons being produced by the ton. Stuff you can’t just toss into the back of a 45-foot trailer. If that level of industrial-scale production existed, they would have found LEADS by now, evidence, factories abandoned with hasty tracks beaten in the parking lot, half-shredded paperwork. Where is that stuff?
And frankly, elucidator’s point remains as valid as ever and nobody has come up with a plausible explanation as to why that bounty hasn’t been claimed.
Remarkably cogent and open minded, Sam. For a Canadian, and all.
May I examine option d)? Did Saddam have WMDs? Well, of course he did, he used them. So why wouldn’t he still have them, after all, he is an evil old bugger, is he not?
Precisely. There is a very good reason why an evil old bugger would divest himself of those WMD’s: they are more trouble than they’re worth. Nerve gas, anthrax, shit like that share one common characteristic: they are crappy weapons. Perhaps useful in a tactical sense, say in the conflict with Iran, who’s blindlingly stupid strategy seemed to depend on the “human wave”.
But as strategic weapons…the kind you need to play with the Big Boys…they are worse than useless. They can infuritate an enemy without militarily weakening him. If Saddam had used any of that crap on the US under any circumstances, Baghdad would be a glowing crater in the Godforsaken Desert in one hour.
So whats the smartest course for an evil old bugger. Get rid of the WMD’s, but resist inspection. You can’t be truly busted, you don’t have anything to worry about. Bonus! Since no one believes you, no one is sure you don’t have warehouses full of Bad Mojo! As long as you resist inspections, knowing you can pass inspection, you keep the bluff alive at no real cost.
Remember his son in law, the retard? The one who defected and told us all those tales about EOB? The Bushistas made much gravy out of his nasty revelations, but was unfortunately negligent in providing context. Dim Bulb also stated that as far as he knew, Saddam destroyed his WMDs just after the Gulf War. (What happened to Ricky Retardo? If you don’t know, I won’t tell you, you’d never believe me.)
As to the intelligence angle on all this: there were plenty mucho stories about disgruntlement amongst the spooks, who felt they were being pressured to provide “intelligence” supporting a foregone, and unsupportable, conclusion. I don’t know as how knuckling under to the Boss is prosecutable. Dereliction of duty? Distinct possiblilty.
I have consistently harped on my skepticism that rock solid intelligence would reveal the existence of something like massive stockpiles of Nasty without a valid hint as to where these things are. Witness our insistence that we have solid but secret intelligence as to whereabouts as well as existence. But when hectored by inspectors to share such gold, and such gold was grudgingly parceled out, it turns out to be utter whale dreck!
And this odd dichotomy of information persists! The Bushistas are dead solid certain that they exist but have no clue as to where! How does one obtain the wealth of information that would lead to a solid conclusion, a conclusion worthy of war…without even so much as a hint of location? From whence does such amazingly selective information derive?
Scurrilous conjecture: The Defense Dept has been effusive in its man-crush over Chalabi. Their kind of guy. They’ve gone so far as to heap praise on him for the intelligence sources in the Iraqi Resistance he has supplied…
And finally…for as much a massive stockpile to exist (as we have been led to believe) at least a thousand people must have some inkling. Even if it were all in one location (which conjecture boggles) there would be soldiers, truck drivers, scientists, janitors…any one of which could have been 250 grand richer three weeks ago. And not one came forth!
As for when the investigation should start, I should like time enough to invest heavily in umbrella futures, for when pigs fly they will be valuable indeed!
There is no chance this will be “investigated”. Karl Rove would rather nail his pecker to a tree and set the tree on fire. They’ll keep a straight face and say “Still looking! Big country, gotta be here somewhere! Nothing to see here, you looky-loos, move along…” until we go back to sleep.
The worst of it is, they’re probably right.
First question, what qualifies as a WMD? Does a production facility count or does there have to be the product? If there is a nuclear weapon without the fuel is that better or worse than finding the fuel but not the bomb? Do detailed plans count (drawings, part numbers etc…)?
Second question, when does the clock start? There are still parts of Iraq that are not secure. What is your benchmark? I would use the first, interim elections as a starting point.
Or, another possibility is that they’ll find things that they’ll argue could have been this or that … sort of enough to satisfy enough true-believers and those who want to believe but never a real smoking gun. Just enough to quiet people down and present enough doubts to the idea that we have totally been had.
Note, also, how they have succeeded in lowering the bar so much. We had been led to believe there was a very active program with substantial quantities of stuff. But, now it is to the point that a few jars of rotting anthrax will be taken as a smoking gun of how much mortal danger we were in! Very clever.
When this shit started, it was all nukes. Saddam had 'em, well, he had a few, well, he’d have 'em real soon. Secret evidence, no doubt about it. Heres this report, “What more proof do you need?” Aluminum tubes, Turkish uranium, Nigerian uranium, ad nauseum. It was when that began to fall apart that they segued into WMD’s. First it was nukes and WMD’s, then it was nukes as WMDs and then it was just WMD’s without nukes included!
Hell, jshore they can’t harldy lower the bar any more without pounding it into the dirt!
A few jars of Anthrax? It takes 10-50,000 spores to kill someone. There is probably enough spores in 2 jars to kill just about everybody on Earth.
WoMD? Who cares anymore. Let’s go get Iran and their nuclear program. They’re making bombs! (and they have oil).:rolleyes:
Hmm, I seem to recall there were CIA sources that did not agree; damned if I can find the cite, though – googling “iraq wmd” is hopeless.
Because they didn’t – they voted to declare that Iraq must follow steps x, y, z OR be declared in material breach. We got to ‘x’, followed by a U.S. invasion.
Because it wouldn’t have mattered, the U.S. would have attacked anyway? No, really – weren’t the inspectors in Iraq like less than a week when the Bush admin declared Iraq was not cooperating?
I’m glad we agree on that.
Here is link dealing with Administration pressures on CIA
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/la-na-cia11oct11.story
Thanks, sezyou.
Sam: there we go, the intelligence analysts did not agree with the Bush administration. And, contrary to your assertion, I believe the U.N. did not agree with the Bush administration.
It’s starting to sounds a lot like your choice A). Not that I think it was probably malicious lying, more likely self-delusion. But lying to yourself is still lying when the matter is this consequential.
You’re being too kind. The authors of the policy which demanded the invasion aren’t self-delusional(except as it applies to their invincibility).
It was pre-ordained. It was only step one.
Riddle me this, Bushman: before the Iraq war started, everyone and his cousin in the White House was screaming about how we needed a war right this second to disarm Iraq’s WMD program and get rid of those massive stockpiles we knew he had. “Each second we wait means another second for the terrorists to get their hands on all that stuff!”, they’d cry. “We can’t wait another six months for Hans Blix to find his buttocks with a road map, we need to invade now!” Or, in other words, just the notion that WMDs might end up in the hands of Ali Crackpot was enough justification for the Bushistas.
Now the war is over, the dust is settled, and there are no WMDs to be found. Looters are running rampant in the countryside, and what stuff we find nowadays is usually stripped bare by the time we get there. And yet, at this moment, when it’s very likely that terrorists can get their hands on Saddam’s alleged WMDs among all this chaos and anarchy, the Bush Administration is suddenly playing everything with an eerie calm. “Hey, we’ve given up hope of finding those WMDs. We don’t need the UN to help us inspect, we’ll take our own leisurely time about it.”
So where are all those panick-stricken Administration dudes from the first paragraph? Shouldn’t they be really crankin’ up the heat now, and bombarding us with daily, massive, 288-point headlines like “Iraq Nuke Facility Raided! Terrorists May Have Bomb!” But nooooooooooooooo, it’s so quiet, I can almost hear myself think.
And what I’m thinking is: maybe the Administration knew all along that Iraq didn’t have WMDs. That maybe the reason Ari Fleischer isn’t running around in a desperate hunt for rogue WMDs is because he – and Bush and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld and Franks and Ashcroft and Rice and Wolfowitz – he knows the terrorists aren’t getting their mitts on Iraqi WMDs because they never existed to begin with.
The Administration would never admit this, of course, just like it’d never support an investigation into the pre-war WMD hysteria and whether or not George W. Bush lied to the world to justify a damn fool war. But the silence is getting deafening…
Maybe, but I guess I was thinking more of Bush himself than the neo-cons. Perhaps GW surrounded himself with True Believers, and naively believed them. In some way it may be comforting if Bush was misled rather than a scoundrel – is it better if he’s being dumb or just playing dumb?
About Perle, Rhummy, et. al.: I’m sure you’re right. I harbor no such illusions about thier innocence in trumping things up to fit a Grand Plan.
Yup, that’s the sort of media analysis we’ll be seeing - theoretic casualty figures based on basic toxicity with no regard to the problems of delivery. [Fox News] “There is enough gas in this shell to brutally murder every inhabitant in a mid-sized city provided they form an orderly queue and inhale willingly”[/Fox News]