It’s been a while since I looked at Hans Blix’s book, but my recollection is that he was more circumspect in his own personal conclusions than what people often ascribe to him.
There are folks who say things like, “Blix proved that WMDs don’t exist!” or “Blix proved Bush was lying!” My recollection of his book was that he thought that the intelligence provided to him on where to look for WMD was useless, but that he needed more time to reach a conclusion about Iraq’s WMD programs. He also clearly concluded that there was nothing that he could do to dissuade Cheney from pressing for war: if he found WMD, Cheney would believe that war was justified; and if he failed to find WMD, it was evidence that Iraq was not complying with the UN resolutions. I don’t remember if he expressed any views about Bush’s mindset, but Blix was very critical of Cheney.
And, of course, one of the claims of the CIA was that SH was moving shit around and playing “cat and mouse”, so it’s not like there was some checklist you could just use and say OK, we’re done now that the checklist is filled out.
Are you under the illusion that the Left, such as it is, likes Obama or what he’s been doing? “Bush in blackface” is the kind of comment I hear about him from the Left, not praise or acceptance.
And we don’t kill them all because we couldn’t do it without being caught, and it would be embarrassing. We couldn’t spin it as anything other than what it is, a massacre; and we love our self delusion that we are heroes, not monsters.
John, while I fully agree with you that the whole “WMDs” casus belli was a bunch of bullshit from day one (culminating with the infamous “they could drop them on us via balloons” :rolleyes: ) I think you’d do well reading this article about the CIA’s involvement in the whole sham:
Just to be clear, I wasn’t addressing anything in that post other than the fact that I don’t think Blix had “cleared” SH in the early part of Jan 2003, and the other poster said. Whatever the intel was, I have no doubt that Bush el al cherry picked and spun whatever they could to make the whole thing seem like we just had to go into Iraq. I never bought any of it.
No, I didn’t say he cleared SH, I said that he cleared enough CIA-identified sites to prove that their intelligence had been wrong. I said that at least twice, and at least once directly to you.
And by “cleared,” I don’t just mean he found no WMDs, I mean he found them either totally unsuitable for the alleged purpose (e.g., a purported CW facility that didn’t even have running water), or obviously long since abandoned.
Plenty more where that came from. Honestly, it’s absurd to argue otherwise, what with Bibi injecting himself in the American elections for just that purpose.
*don’t buy the “nuclear” part of course. “Bomb bomb, Iran” is more like it.
What makes you think they don’t have one? It’s not like we haven’t threatened to use nuclear weapons on Iran in the past; it would be even more incompetent if we were making threats but didn’t even bother to plan for it.
Perhaps we need to call in Hans Blix to get to the bottom of the US-Israeli plans to nuke Iran. Intelligence analysts - I mean, lefty blogs have a secret source who claims the US is an imminent threat. We can’t let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud!
Haven’t the past ten years proven to you that indeed, the US is an imminent threat to nations that don’t bow to them? I mean, what else do you need? More deaths?
He was full of shit as we well know by now – hopefully.
Are you part of the “we make our own reality” community? Who was Iraq & with what ‘threatening to invade’? Don’t you think the '91 pummeling/butchering (“Highway of death/turkey shoot” bring any memories back?) taught them anything, or are Iraqis – SH included – that dumb by virtue of their place of birth?
Sure you do, because this is what prompted my first correction to your mischaracterization of my claim:
[QUOTE=John Mace]
I don’t recall Blix’s reports as being all that definitive. He was, after all, asking for more time and more inspections. If had already “proven” the CIA to be wrong, why did he need to do anything else? Bush effectively cut him off, though.
I think what you may be missing, and I mentioned this upthread, is that SH had to not only destroy all his WMDs, but he had to account for their destruction, too.
[/QUOTE]
So at least this morning, you seemed to think that “cleared” meant that Blix had nothing further to do, because he had shown that there were no WMDs anywhere in Iraq, and he had accounted for their destruction, too.
But that is a much higher bar than merely proving that the CIA was wrong about the specific sites it identified, e.g. the satellite photos that Powell used in his dog and pony show. And once we knew the CIA was wrong about the most important reason for going to war, then we no longer had justification to invade. Which is exactly the reason that our NATO allies, France and Germany, did not support the invasion.
Yes I did, and as I thought I made clear, my definition of “large” is, “sufficient that a reasonable person would conclude that nothing short of war could protect the US from Iraq.” In other words, IMO Blix did more than enough to prove that Iraq was not an imminent threat to the US, and therefore Bush would be lying if he certified to Congress that it was. But I never claimed that Blix cleared Saddam of wanting WMDs, or even of having small quantities hidden in locations not yet inspected.
