How do you know? Are you taking Saddam’s word?
One does wonder if there is any length december will not go to in his drooling idiocy to excuse any action done by his dear, dear Bushies.
Rather the inability to control the post-organized resistance period, the continued instability and until recently grossly declining security situation cast light on the unsupported hastiness and rush.
The other comments have this piece of idiocy adequately covered.
No, I’m taking the word of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which performed the annual inspections. Idiot.
International inspections december my boy. Inventoried materials. Sadam’s word had nothing to do with this. You really are a dumb knee jerking moron.
Were they performing inspections between 1998 and 2002? I thought they only got back in because the UN made a fuss, thanks to leadership from George Bush.
Yes, Your Holy Pope, George The Infallible did apply pressure to get inspectors back in as part of the nice fine run up to ignore them and start a fine little transformative war.
For Collounsbury, who may not have been a math major, Saddam had four years when he could do anything he wanted with the nuclear material. You’re complaining that the Coalition ought to have gotten control of the material 2 weeks sooner than they did.* Two weeks is less than 1% of 4 years.
Without Bush’s leadership, Saddam and his charming sons would have maintained control of this dangerous, radioactive material for an indefinite period. That’s a worse scenario than what actually occurred, doncha think?
[sub]*Actually, your argument doesn’t even make that much sense. If the coalition had delayed its attack until they had more troops, they might have begun guarding this nuclear facility even later than they did. [/sub]
This is like shooting fish in a barrel. You might think stuff, but you actually know jack shit.
There was an inspection in May 1998. The inspection program was disrupted by the bombings in December 1998, and the 1999 inspection was skipped. The regular inspections resumed and took place in January of 2000, 2001 and 2002.
Here’s the chronology:
http://www.iaea.org/worldatom/Programmes/ActionTeam/chronology.html#1998
No Moron Man, I am an analyst by training. That means I am paid to analyze, to use my grey matter, something which you are severaly lacking in.
The inventories pre-existed the war run-up, they were check when they went back in.
The whole thing about accounting for nuclear materials and seeing if the accusations of a re-booted nuclear program and all that, idiot boy.
[quote]
You’re complaining that the Coalition ought to have gotten control of the material 2 weeks sooner than they did.* Two weeks is less than 1% of 4 years.
[/quyote]
Well, Moron, for those of us gifted with the slightest ability to actually think and do so critically, one can discern a serious difference between materials under the control of a rigid police state and which have been properly inventoried and sealed by international teams (seals and content that were verified upon return) and a site that is utterly not under any kind of fucking control at all and open to a whole range of bad actors, looters and mafias.
I am sure, in the midst of your ideological haze of inspid excuse making and otherwise typical partisan idiocy, you can vaguely discern a different risk profile between the two states which goes rather beyond some muddle and unthinking statement to basic algebra.
Now I know as an actuary you just punch fucking numbers w/o actually thinking critically, but that’s your fucking problem.
No, I don’t think so you stupid fucking moron, I don’t at all. The inventoried materials were not weapons grade and were under control. Now some unknown amounts are out in the wide, wide world and might make their way into the hands of bad actors who can construct nice terror type weapons, like dirty bombs and the like.
Further, of course, there is the damage and danger to the population, but that is of minor importance in the over all scheme of things.
If makes perfect sense to anyone other than a complete moron such as yourself.
Under the regime, the facility was under State control and guarded by the State. The whole police state thing you know. Only after the invasion forces reached the area, by all reports, did the guards flee.
Delaying invasion has no fucking effect on the presence of the guards.
You are so incredibly stupid I am actually stunned.
Frankly, I can’t think of a much worse scenario than radioactive waste being consumed by children.
Under Saddam it was contained.
Under Bush it was consumed by childern.
Through gross negligence in the planning and conduct of the war, Bush has poisoned children with radioactive waste.
G. W. Bush, as President, Commander in Chief, and the driving force behind the war.
The question now, given the illegal nature of the war under international law, given the lack of weapons of mass destruction which had ostensibly been the justification for the war, and given the planning and conduct of the war that has now led to children eating radioactive waste, is whether the American people will hold G. W. Bush and his administration responsible, or whether they will continue to support his conduct.
Shame on G. W. Bush for what he has done, and shame on the American people if they do not hold him responsible for his conduct by impeaching him forthwith.
december has an incisive analysis about the time required. To protect a nuclear facility you’d need a couple of helicopters, some armed troops, some food, water, and a truck or two. Where the hell is the US military supposed to find stuff like that? The French might have a helicopter and some guns, but they refused to play so I blame them.
A few kilos of nuclear material in the hands of Osama is a small price to pay if my taxes will be $33 lower next year.
I can. How about a children’s prison, specifically for political prisoners? How about a children’s graveyard, where 200 children were mass murdered – some of them perhaps buried alive. How about torturing children in order to control their parents? These were Standard Operating Procedure for the Ba’ath regime. Now those practices ar ended.
It’s certainly a tragedy that some children and some adults may have gotten radiation poisoning, but let’s keep it in perspective.
BTW, should the UN have allowed Saddam to keep this radioactive material? It had the potential to be used in dirty bomb?
And still does, cheerfully enough.
December, do you understand the difference between support and blind support?
The U.S. fucked up here, badly. That says absolutely nothing about the moral status of the larger picture.. Whether or not we wre right to go into Iraq, we should have secured this facility much, much sooner.
The U.S. needs to acknowledge that they fucked up badly here. That children will die painful deaths because of the oversight of our military. It may well be that, in the larger picture, it’s worth it. But the people responsible need to feel the guilt and shame that comes from killing kids through negligence so that they will take precautions to keep this from happening again.
December, even in the best, most inevitable, most justified of wars, the good guys make bad decisions that get good people killed. Dosen’t mean that war is never justified, only that the people that take on that responsibilty for the greater good need to accept that the price they are paying is that they are going to hurt innocents. That’s what we did here, and you’d do your cause more good if you stood up straight and sad “That was handled wrong, and the people who made the mistakes won’t be the people that paid the cost. Next time–may it be a century from now–we have to do better.”
december, as always, is missing the point. Yes, Saddam was evil. I don’t think you’ll find a liberal/progressivist/person who would say otherwise. But the point is that if we are going to go into a nation and take him out, we need to secure the country so that the people are secure and free and things are actually better. Debating you is a lot like banging my head against a wall, but I’ll try. We have the largest military force in the world. With it, we should have been able to secure Iraq in a matter of days. No looting, no rioting, and all dangerous materials secured. Yeah, Iraq’s the size of California, but Homeland Security could have every nuclear plant in California secured in a matter of minutes if the situation warranted it. So it’s only a matter of transportation infrastructure, which we have, to get to Iraq and secure things there. Do you see that a failure to do so is negligence on our part, and negligent homocide if these children die from radiation poisoning we didn’t try to prevent for two weeks?
In the bizarre world of december, if US forces had rushed to protect the Iraqi nuclear site then children would suffer in prison. Hence, to save the children it was better to leave the site unprotected.
Is it just me, or is the air getting stupid in here?
Can I just ask why any of you even bother to argue with December any more?
There is absolutely nothing you can say that will for one second make him look at events in an unbiased manner. Not a thing.
You know what happens next. Either he:
- Blatantly misinterprets another poster
- Post as cite an article from a blog
- Writes a very poor poem
- Tries to somehow blame it all on the EU/UN/any other organisation he dislikes
- Tries to change subject
Or any of a large number of tactics he does to avoid facing some fairly obvious conclusions. He’s just not worth the bother.
december is the reason I will never vote Republican.
There are times I really do feel for the conservatives on this board. What must it be like to be in there, day after day, fighting the good fight as you see it and yet still have to know that whenever you open a political thread there’s a good chance that december is going to be there and on your side?
Oh, come on, Spoofe, this is pathetic. As soon as we had control of the area, we could have sent a tank and a couple of APCs with troops in them and had the site secured and you know it. And everyone who’s not a screaming partisan knows we shoud have.
It was a fuckup, major-league, and no amount of quibbling can change that.