That’s what I get for posting with insufficient caffeine in my bloodstream.
What I think Saddam Hussein was trying to do was to balance two opposite points – telling the UN and the Western world that he didn’t have WMDs, but leaving his hostile neighbors thinking that he did have them, and avoid attacking Iraq as a result. He certainly couldn’t have told Hans Bilx, “Okay, here’s all of my evidence documenting the destruction of my WMDs, but you have to keep it a secret so my neighbors won’t realize how vulnerable I am.” So yeah, to the Western media, Saddam’s position was “I’ve destroyed everything, leave me alone” – but he had to hold back from a total confession so the wolves wouldn’t see his belly was vulnerable. Or something like that.
And it would have worked, too, if only the U.S. didn’t have a President who was determined to start a war, come hell or high water…
It would require someone more versed in it than me to elaborate on the subject, but I know from the studies I did so many years ago that two overriding themes among Arab leaders of the 20th century are sovereignty and defiance.
Arab nations take their sovereignty very seriously. Maybe I should say, Arab nations take their sovereignty as seriously as, say, the United States does. For example, I suspect that Osama bin Laden’s beef with American troops in Saudi is based in part on the concept of rigid sovereign status. Hussein’s throwing open the doors to the U.N. is tantamount to relinquishing sovereign status. I suspect that Hussein was reacting to the inspectors in much the same way Americans would react to U.N. inspectors trying to roam around the United States: the efforts would be opposed, delayed, and undermined as much as possible.
Along with this comes the concept of defiance. “Winning” isn’t defined in the same way that Americans define it. When Nasser got trounced in the Six Day War, he didn’t quit, and he didn’t change his objectives. And it appears as if the Egyptian public was very understanding and supportive Nasser’s position. Sadat also seems to have profited somewhat from his defeat in the Yom Kippur War at first. But when he stopped being defiant and instead pursued a path of compromise, he got dead. And of course the most relevant example is Hussein himself in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
You would need someone far better versed in the modern politics of the region to go into better detail, but it seems to me that those two concepts are behind Hussein’s stonewalling. I suspect that the question of the weapons themselves was incidental to the perceived violation of sovereignty and the required traditional response to that violation. Veering away from that pattern may well have been impossible for Hussein, and it might still be unthinkable for other Arab leaders as well.
The fact no one has so far found any of Saddams’ WMD doesn’t really prove anything.
I don’t know myself if he still had them but until someone finds either the signs of their destruction OR the WMD themselves I am keeping an open mind.
Actually I think finding the destroyed WMD would be easier to find since there isn’t as much reason for Saddam to hide that(AND their destruction would be harder to cover up) as there would be for him to hide their present whereabouts.
As for why no one has come forward to say “Here they are gimme money!”…I doubt whoever moved them to wherever they are now(IF they exist) lived much longer than the time it took to report back to Saddam the job was done.(We are not exactly talking about Kris Kringle here guys)
I believe one or the other will eventually be found…too many people have their own agendas to pursue to think otherwise.
Operative word being “strategic”. As a weapon against the United States: worse than useless, might as well stuff a hand grenade up your Nixon and pull the pin. The greatest likelihood of Americans being harmed by Iraqi WMD arrived when we moved our troops within range.
i know this is off topic, but i have to point this out. Glaspie never gave Iraq the green light to invade, even Tariq Aziz says he knew the US would have a strong reaction. Plus, if the US was okey dokey with the invasion why did the security council condemn the invasion the day after it happened?
In November 1992, Iraq’s former deputy prime minister, Tarik Aziz, gave Glaspie some vindication. He said she had not given Iraq a green light. “She just listened and made general comments,” he told USA Today. “We knew the United States would have a strong reaction.”
Could you elaborate on the point about mixed signals sent by the U.S. during the run-up to the invasion of Kuwait? How did those influence your government’s decision?
There were no mixed signals. We should not forget that the whole period before August 2 witnessed a negative American policy towards Iraq. So it would be quite foolish to think that, if we go to Kuwait, then America would like that.
The US is routinely held to a double standard and brought up on false charges around the world. Last time i checked, the US has been accused of intentional genocide at least 3 times in the last 30 years. And people can’t figure out why the administration didn’t want to join the ICC :rolleyes:. Why not ask a black person in 1890 why he didn’t want to work in a white brothel while your at it.
Most countries in the middle east have chemical or biological weapons. I fail to see how having them would intimidate neighbors. They have them too.
The intelligence angle of this is decidedly odd. We are given to understand that GeeDubya has rock-solid, undeniable proof of the existence of these weapons, and lots and lots of them. We’re talking warehouses full, not some dinky locker at the Greyhound station.
Surely, we can expect that this intelligence, which we are assured is of such fine quality that one need have no qualms about going to war over it, surely we can expect several different sources, no? Certainly we would not be taking the word of expatriate or exile organizations who clearly have a vested interest in these proceedings. Certainly not.
So of all these many impartial intelligence sources, all of them are utterly certain as to the existence of the WMD’s, none of them know where the damn things were? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?
While we are all breathlessly awaiting Shodan’s to enlighten us on Saddam, and maybe even tell us why Coca-Cola brought out New Coke. . .
A small addendum to lightstrand’s blog.
Ok, so I [Saddam] have enough mustard gas to keep Iran on its toes, and make me continue to look like the Big Man on the Persian Gulf. I also have a couple of mobile trailers left over from years ago, they may or may not even work. But they are way cool to drive around.
So everythings cool until that crazy son-of-a-bitch Osama bin Laden pulls his little stunt on 9/11 that makes Adm. Yamamoto at Pearl Harbor look like Fighting Joe Hooker at Chancellorsville.
I may have met with someone from Al Queda once, but ObL hates me more than the Americans. So I have a few drinks, and a few whores, and close down a few mosques. But he will get no help from me, you think I’d give him a nuke that I don’t even have?
Oh well, the Americans will go after ObL, maybe they will find him in a cave somewhere. I’ve got nothing to hide, at least nothing that can’t be destroyed in a few days. Not to misunderestimate Bush Jr, but really, they got nothing on me.
France and Russia will keep things bottled up in the Security Council, they will be out $billions if they don’t.
And if things get too hot, I’ll make them even hotter. I’ll force the Americans to level Baghdad in a manner unforeseen by the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan.
And if worse comes to worst, I will slip away from Iraq, do you know what just the yearly interest on $10 billion is?
Hey, why is the concrete ceiling of the this bunker shaking . . .
Yes. Very much so. Any way you look at it, it’s a massive intelligence failure. Someone should know something about the stockpiles, or lack thereof.
And was that the CIA saying the administration was selectively amassing the evidence, ‘spinning’ it or what have you…more than three months after the fact. I was wondering why a main intelligence organization suddenly went public with a political agenda, but not anymore.
More an intelligence interpretation failure than a general intelligence failure. Many of these wild tales about Saddam’s weapons programs were around while Clinton was president, and he had the good sense not to go apeshit over the hearsay coming from the CIA et. al. After all, with the end of the cold war, the intell bureaucrats had to come up with some justification for their own existence. Picking up on rumors and dubious crap, along with the good stuff, is part and parcel of intelligence operations, so it’s not even surprising that they had “evidence” to support various Iraqi doomsday scenarios. The trouble is, that the administration either totally bought into anything that supported their preconceptions, or knowingly used dubious intelligence to bolster their case for toppling Saddam. Neither scenario reflects well on the president.
Depends on how you define apeshit, I guess. Targeted bombings, sanctions, no-fly zones…Clinton must have agreed with somebody. I don’t think we’ve taken any action against Iraq without UK backing during the past three administrations. All of these people, including the British leaders, cannot be just deflecting attention from domestic troubles the whole time. So it seems the intelligence has been interpreted in a consistent fashion all along.
And we’re just talking about the stockpiles as among the missing. According to the CIA site you linked to on the other thread, those mobile facilities are weapons facilities. That is their interpretation. That intelligence probably walked right in the door, 4 people, big effort there…still, it’s potentially correct. If they are not production facilities, then the CIA is wrong. Lots of people would be wrong, then, but most importantly our intelligence community itself.
Yeah, rule number one around here: never post before coffee.
Certainly, not knowing the full extent of a potential opponent’s military capabilities can serve as kind of deterrent. On the other hand, I don’t know of any country that tries to make virtue out of this particular vice; all states keep their chemical and biological weapons capabilities strictly secret. Perhaps that secrecy, in and of itself, serves as a deterrent, but as far as I know, most thinking regarding deterrence builds on the idea that one’s opponents know they’ll get their asses kicked if they try anything funny, á la MAD, for example.
The argument that “Of course he had WMDs: why wouldn’t he cooperate otherwise?” is a fundamental one for apologists of the Bush administration’s war. There’s a rhetorical element to this line of reasoning: in particular, it is important to emphasize, even exaggerate, Iraqi non-compliance, while simultaneously excluding any other possible explanation for their behavior (other than that of willfully hiding “WMDs”). This argument has been drummed into our heads so heavily that even critics of the war have a hard time believing Hussein might have actually been telling the truth over the last year or so: that he really had destroyed all his chemical/biological weapons, and was being fairly cooperative with the UN. So in a way (in a number of ways, actually), Shodan’s OP is unfairly skewed to begin with. It is based on a non-problematic acceptance of the idea that Iraq refused to cooperate with the UN and the inspection teams, and that the only possible explanation for this lack of cooperation was that Iraq was hiding its “WMDs.” By contrast, squeegee suggests that Hussein’s “refusal to cooperate” is rhetorically exaggerated by those who supported the war (he certainly wasn’t “shooting the inspectors,” even if his cooperation was at times rather grudging), while I and Sofa King (among others) provide pretty reasonable explanations for his foot-dragging reluctance in the face US/UN demands. The response to this view from the right has been either 1) hand-waving accusations that all us lefties are naive pacifists appeasing a modern-day Hitler, or 2) shrilly hysterical screams that we know Saddam has WMDs, ‘cause Bush, Rumsfield, Powell, et. al., tell us so. Those arguments seem less valid with every passing day. Sofa King:
Yeah, not that I’m an expert on styles of Arab leadership either, but this sounds intuitively reasonable to me. I would not be at all surprised to learn that US policy-makers were well-versed in this line of reasoning, and were consciously, purposely exploiting Hussein’s tendency to defiance as justification for the war. C of L:
We had a long discussion about the supposed “green light” given by Glaspie in a thread a while ago. Glaspie knew that Iraq had massed troops on the border of Kuwait – that was the purpose of her meeting with Hussein, in fact – but her talk with Hussein and Aziz followed the dictates laid down by Secretary of State Baker at that time: the US was to maintain a strictly neutral, “hands off” attitude with regard to border disputes between Gulf states. I find that to be a perfectly reasonable policy, myself, and Glaspie, serving as rather low-level diplomat, certainly didn’t have the authority to communicate anything else (IMHO).
Afterward, during either a congressional hearing on the issue or in an interview with a reporter, Glaspie dropped the rather revealing comment, “We certainly didn’t expect him to take the entire country.” Had Hussein’s objectives been of more limited scope – i.e., had he merely taken the disputed island and/or the small strip of land where the slant-drilling had been going on – I doubt the Gulf War would have happened. In other words, I think Hussein might have been communicating, in his own obtuse, flowery way, that he was planning to take over the whole country, but that Glaspie thought that, at worst, he might be planning a limited military incursion. Anyway, that’s my take on the whole scenario, FWIW.
Regarding this:
I would be interested to know about those three accusations. Anyway, it’s not unreasonable to expect a country that claims to promote the rule of law, even in the arena of international relations, would be an enthusiastic supporter of the ICC, rather than a stubborn detractor. On the contrary: it seems to me that in this instance it is the US which possesses the double standard, not the international community.
And I don’t get your last metaphor: do you mean that the US is like a black person c.a. 1890, and the ICC is like a white whorehouse?
Not enough time except to check back in, and thank everyone for their responses (light strand and his blog especially).
And to ask a further question - should we have allowed Saddam to get away with it? Should we have gone on indefinitely being relatively certain that Saddam really had WMD, in defiance of the cease-fire? And then either lifted the sanctions, or left them in place indefinitely?
it just doesnt justify the point or end result. - the means just dont justify the ends no matter what political camp you claim to hail from!
just why was Iraq singled out in the 1st place???
heaps of other nations posses WMD. yet they dont incurr the intense, no life spared, wrath of the allmighty USA, or its cruise WMD missiles, wholesale dispersion throughout thier county of unexploded cluster bombs, or wholesale contamination by DU, lets face it, the USA has a total monoploly on W666MD, and the USA sure dont like any opposition huh?
the USA has progressed way beyond mere napalm, agent orange, etc, al la Vietnam, nowdays, instead we have MOAB, and shock and awe crap to subjugate those the present USA administration is displeased with., hey lets get real, the US weapons are ‘refined’ nowdays, they are soaked in DU, which result in the ‘enemies’ country being saturated with DU (depleted uranium) contamination for decades to come.
stuff up the enemies gene pool. what you got? - you got ultimate control huh? - the US commonly uses weapons that result in mass destruction, food, water supplies contaminated beyond belief or healthy compomised beyond life sustainable levels.
just who is the real terroist? - seems obvious to me
Zan
Does anyone besides me find it extremely disturbing that some defenders of the war are now arguing that lack of appropriate paperwork can be a just cause for war? (Not just ElJeffe, and not just in this thread, either.) A war over documentation? Are you people freaking serious? And I suppose foreign nationals arriving at American airports who fail to present valid visas should be executed, too. :rolleyes:
Err…Sorry, perhaps I’m just wholefully ignorant since I didn’t follow the news during the recent days…But did the ICC actually indict Blair? Aren’t you mixing here the complaints recently brought in a Belgian regular court with the ICC?
