How long should it take to find the WMDs in Iraq?

Great Debates
61

Hey, I’m already on record as saying that if WMDs are not found, there should be an investigation. Presidents should not lie about things as important as this. Just because I happened to support this war does not mean I approve of any means to bring it about.

But I doubt the president lied. Or at least, even if he did, the whole thing will be set up in such a way as to give him deniability. The reports will be real, but over-stated. The intelligence he was given will be accurate, but the information it was based on may have been planted somewhere downstream. That’s how intelligence agencies cook the books. They don’t just write fake reports - they plant information in places where it’s likely to be found, play numbers games until they can come up with a set of data that supports what they believe, cherry-pick intelligence reports to skew a conclusion. That sort of thing.

But I don’t think even anything that evil took place. I think the weapons were there. Certainly, Saddam’s behaviour gave us every indication that they were there. And it’s not just the U.S. and Britain saying so.

For example, here’s what Canada’s Intelligence Agency had to say about it:

This conclusion, while not as far-ranging as the U.S. or Britain position, is pretty damning. And I’ll remind you that Canada opposed the war and has no reason to lie for the United States.

from the same report, here’s the summary of the UN’s position:

Also pretty damning.

But all this is so far contradicted by the fact that no weapons have been found. One obvious conclusion is that Iraq destroyed them all before the war. Another possibility is that they destroyed them long ago but didn’t want to admit it because it wanted to maintain the threat (elucidator’s thesis). Another is that the weapons are still there, and still carefully hidden away. Yet another is that they were shipped out of the country just prior to the war.

As of right now, I think the jury is still out on all of them. But if they aren’t found at all, and the scientists and witnesses in Iraq claim that they were destroyed a decade ago, then there should be an investigation into the intelligence failures that led up to the war.

62

>> Certainly, Saddam’s behaviour gave us every indication that they were there. And it’s not just the U.S. and Britain saying so.

I disagree. The government of the USA selectively relied on evidence which supported its position and selectively ignored evidence which did not. By doing that some people will arrive at the conclusion that Americans never set foot on the moon and the moon is, in fact, made of blue cheese. The government did not make a good faith effort to find out the truth but rather had pre-ordained the conclusion and only used the evidence which would support that conclusion. And this in the face of the entire world’s opposition. When you are acting against the entire world you have an extra responsibility to be right. This time the government of the USA was wrong.

63

My friend, them is weasel words. It’s been well cited on this board that the administration ignored intelligence agencies and misrepresented the intelligence they’d been given. The ultimate fault here lies with GEORGE BUSH, and his team, not with their intelligence minions who in at least a few cases were angry that the intelligence they were passing on wasn’t being used correctly. It wasn’t a CIA spook who waved nonexistent reports around.

Don’t already fob this off on some scapegoats in the armed forces and the CIA. The President and his administration have been blatantly dishonest.

64

…And I also said earlier that if it turns out the President lied, then he should be impeached.

Good enough?

65

Surely any president who lies to Congress and the American People in order to lead the country into war should be impeached. Proving the fact that he lied is always going to be extremely difficult. A better indicator might be some strategic resigning within his cabinet.

If, and I emphazixe the word “if”, Bush lied, then Colin Powell is an equally shamless deciever. It’s interesting that with all the vitriole against Bush one encounters on this Board, I can’t remember ever reading any attacks on Powell. Why is that?

66

John, I believe Powell was actually in favor of waiting and it was Rumsfeld who pushed without regard for anything.

67

You’re right about Powell too, John, and there is a depressingly-long list of other accomplices as well, starting with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Powell is getting off easy, I think, because he has a reserve of respect for his intelligence and integrity built up previously, and his account may not be overdrawn yet. Further, he was a strong voice in favor of a reality-based approach. His about-face for the UN pitch is still unexplained, and his failure to resign is more depressing than puzzling.

But the vitriol should go mainly to the man in charge, and it does.

68

Not what you’d glean from his incredibly alarming presentation at the UN.

Fact is, the Bush Administration carried its “with us or against us” policy even within its own ranks. Clearly, after some early and largely futile resistance, Powell succumbed to the trappings of power. In that sense, I believe he deserves as much criticism as the rest of the neocon cabal – if not more, as there was really nothing by way of evidence that could have possibly changed his mind. And more than anyone else, he was perfectly aware of that.

In hindsight, the whole UN “presentation” is one of the most blatant displays of lies and distortions this Administration put forth in their haste to fabricate a case to justify their plans. Plans, I might add, already in place many years ago and largely reliant on geopolitical gains, not “fear” of WMD as anyone familar (and who isn’t by this point?) with the PNAC should know.

As for the other two examples of lies and distortions that stand out most in my mind, one only need read Bush’s speeches at the UN in September and the follow-up to the American public in Cincinatti.

In all three of those cases, the amount of misinformation spread was simply astonishing. All the more so because even at the time, most of it was proven inaccurate. Why it has taken so long for the mainstream press and the American public to come to this stark realization, when most of the rest of the world saw right through this act from the start, remains one of those questions for which there are no readily apparent answers.

None too flattering that is.

69

Am I wrong here, or does this article say they’ve given up looking, having found nothing?

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=405395

70

OK, under that assumption, he moves his WMD (everything movable, anyway - and the Admin and its defenders seem to contend that it is mostly movable) within his ‘Fortress Baghdad’ defensive perimeter (as defined by Saddam), and quite possibly has the rest destroyed on the eve of invasion. From there, Saddam can use his WMD if it’s clear that it’s use-'em-or-lose-power time.

Now, when Baghdad fell one hell of a lot faster than the Karbala Gap, don’t you think we’d be left with a bunch of WMDs within that perimeter? There were no reports of any indication that the Iraqi defenders were engaged in any significant destruction of their own assets.

Can’t see why. The international opposition to the war wasn’t based on any belief that Saddam had no WMDs.

Any hope to destroy serious WMD stockpiles at multiple locations across the country would be doomed to failure, IMHO. Efficient destruction of different kinds of biological and chemical nasties presumably has to each be done in its own way, and can’t exactly be done well by application of lots of TNT, because you’d likely disperse as much as you destroyed.

And here your forces are quickly losing control over large chunks of your country; what’s the likelihood that any complex task will be done efficiently? Heck, they couldn’t even seem to blow bridges up, after they’d had them wired for demolition.

And then there’s the implication that embarrassing the US in this manner was more important to Saddam than retaining his best weapons for survival. If he had WMD and wasn’t going to use them when the chips were this far down, just when was he going to use them, and why did he bother having them in the first place?

The idea seems to imply a bizarre approach on Saddam’s part to both survival and use of his key weapons, and a superhuman efficiency (that they were clearly incapable of) in destroying them, in the worst of circumstances. Sorry, Sam, I just can’t buy it.

71

My question as well. After all, even our Bush Doctrine (aka the doctrine of distant pre-emption) rationale, in a nutshell, was: “Saddam has WMDs, and they might fall into the hands of terrorists, to be used against us. We need to invade Iraq to defend ourselves against this possibility.”

Now we’re finding that securing potential WMD sites was an extremely low priority; that our troops left such sites unsecured as a matter of course as they drove for Baghdad. IOW, if the Administration believed the WMDs existed, it didn’t really care whose hands they fell into.

If Bush believed his own words, he’d be more terrified by those WMDs now than he was two months ago. Because now, instead of being just in Saddam’s hands, they’d be loose in the world, available for the terrorists to use against us. But he seems to be perfectly happy about the whole deal.

This means that, even in its most outrageous justification for invading Iraq, President Bush was totally bullshitting us all.

So we already know he’s a baldfaced liar. Whether WMDs are found or not has nothing to do with that anymore.

You’re being too kind to him, 'luci. But can I use that as a sig anyway?

72

BTW it’s been a week since Huda Ammash aka Mrs Anthrax has been arrested but she presumably hasn’t provided any information leading US troops to WMD stockpiles.

This and the other events mentioned in the thread shed some light on a debate . that we had a while before the war where I argued that the US would have problems finding WMD after the war.
Specifically I said:
“One big problem is that the objective is to “disarm” Iraq. But the US doesn’t know where the weapons are hidden. After regime change there will be no central control of the weapons. It will be open season for Iraqi rogue elements, smugglers and maybe terrorists to grab the WMD and scoot off with them either for use or sale. US forces will blunder around the country for months but by the time they find the weapons sites most of the weapons may be gone.”
A certain Canadian poster thought otherwise and said the following:
“Gee, I’d guess that SOME people know where those weapons are. Actually, the US knows exactly where they are.”

“Once the U.S. occupies that country, all those scientists and engineers will show the U.S. exactly where everything is. It will all be destroyed”

"If Saddam is out of the way, the people guarding those facilities will probably fold like a cheap suit. And these aren’t ideologues like the Taliban, who will risk life and limb in order to ‘strike back’ at the U.S. They’re bureaucrats and soldiers whose families are held hostage by Saddam. If they know the regime is done for, the likeliest response by them will be to yell, “Hey America! Here are those weapons you’re looking for!” "

So what happened Sam?

73

To paraphrase Ron Reagan in a recent Salon interview, “they’ll find the WMD as soon as the C-130s land and they can get them in place.”

74

CP, Give Sam a little credit for facing the music on this one, even partially - as elucidator pointed out, ALL of the other Usual Suspects haven’t had the moral courage, and we know who they are as well as they do.

Of course, the standard pro-war answer we’ve been getting, even before the war, is that it was all worth it just to liberate the oppressed Iraqi people, so some faulty intelligence about a side issue doesn’t really matter. Doesn’t make it true, though.

75

“Give Sam a little credit for facing the music on this one, even partially”
OK though “partially” is the key word. His new theory of Saddam suddenly destroying all the WMD just before the war doesn’t make much sense for reasons that Elucidator and RTF have gone into.

And if Saddam or his loyalists have successfully moved the weapons, the US is probably in a worse position than before the war. The Baathists can still give or sell the weapons to terrorists if they want to and now have much less to lose because there is no regime which can be retaliated against.

76

RT, I’m flattered by your request, or would be if I had so much as a shred of modesty. Be advised I’m entirely content to share, no permission need be sought. Its only fair. Vonnegut I borrow, Bierce I steal, Twain I plunder.

I repeat my commendation to Sam for having the stones to face this surly mob. We have set out a banquet of crow, its not fair that he should have to eat it all himself. But apparently none of the rest of the UsSusp have sufficient respect for us, or themselves, for that matter. Pretty ballsy for a Canadian.

And Fearless Misleader? I am bracing myself for the distinct possibility that he and his will get away with it. At worst, someone will be sent foward to fall on his sword. (Remember how Nixon was going to chuck John Mitchell to the wolves? The “Big Enchilada”?)

Keep an eye on John McCain. If he takes the first big bite out of GeeDubya, then the trajectory of the shit will intersect the locus of the fan.

77

It’s interesting that a few of the Bush-bashers have turned this thead into “Case closed, We’ve Already Looked Long Enough”.

I guess I’d like to know that, if this is true, why is none of the press or other media running with that thesis? I don’t buy that they’re cowering if fear.

Elucidator: What’s your take on Powell? Whatever you think of Bush’s intellect, Powell is no dummy. Do you think he just got himself in over his head and now is trying to cut his losses?

78

I don’t know. I had thought highly of him, but when I examine that opinion, I find it isn’t based on much, more like an impression. I have read stories that imply he was pretty weak when it came to investigating the My Lai massacre, but conclusive evidence is lacking, and I wouldn’t go futher with that, because it is so truly awful a suspicion.

I’m not entirely convinced that the Bushistas themselves knew that they were full of shit. History is replete with incidents of men who accepted the “intelligence” that fit thier preconceptions, and ignored the rest. Stalin and “Operation Barbarossa” being a prime example.

Powell’s personal charisma and gravitas are testified to by many people, but that is not in itself indicative of intelligence. I have read than when he found out that the “Nigerian uranium” stuff was pure crapola, he hit the ceiling. But thats all he did, apparently.

Many a good man has been seduced by the urge to be a player, an insider. The price for that is frequently pretty high. I guess I’d have to say he was willing to pay it, alternative explanations being scarce.

Damn shame.

79

Cyberpundit: I honestly don’t know what’s going on. The U.S. captured ‘Dr. Germ’ today, to go along with ‘Dr. Anthrax’, and probably ‘Dr. It’s-Not-Herpes-I-Just-Have-A-Cold-Sore’.

By now I would have fully expected that that U.S. had a very solid handle on exactly what was going on in Iraq. These are not hardened soldiers who won’t talk - they’re just scientists and functionaries who have everything to gain by cooperating with the U.S. and very little to lose. They should be talking like Roseanne on a coke binge. And yet, the administration is providing no new evidence of WMD.

That disturbs me. Perhaps we’ll still find lots. Maybe so far the scientists are still negotiating and holding out for a better deal. Maybe they HAVE been singing, and the U.S. is putting together a devastating dossier that they’ll show the world when they’ve got all their ducks in a row.

Or maybe those weapons were never there. Maybe Saddam did destroy them a long time ago, and all of the U.S.'s intelligence was fabricated or wildly over-stated. In which case, heads should roll. Either the intelligence agencies are deceitful or incompetant, in which case there needs to be a housecleaning, or the administration lied. In which case there needs to be accountability.

I supported this was wholeheartedly, and still do. For me, it was not just about WMDs. To me, it was a moral issue. Saddam was a butcher, and a major political problem in the middle east. Ridding the world of him was like lancing a boil off the planet. Good riddance. And the Iraqi people seem to agree with me, so at least that’s a settled issue as far as I’m concerned - the war was moral and just, and I’m proud of supporting it.

However… Just because I supported the war doesn’t mean I would support all means for making it come about. An administration should NEVER lie about matters of war. IF it turns out that the Bush administration did, there should be serious consequences.

80

er, supported this WAR. Not ‘was’.