I’ve been lurking for the better part of two years, and this’ll be my first OP.
This has been brought up tangentially in a couple threads, but from what I’ve seen, there hasn’t been any focused discussion on this particular point.
So, this is really simple. Let’s say tomorrow someone finds tons and tons of chem and bio weapons stashed someonewhere in the middle of the Iraqi desert. What are the odds that people (actual citizens) and the various governments of the world will actually believe it?
I could add different scenarios as to who, and where, and how, but I’d like to keep things as general as possible.
Let’s face it, people have been suggesting (and even expecting, it seems, in a lot of cases) that Bush, et al will or should just plant the damned ‘evidence’ and get the searching over with.
So, if WMDs are found (legitemately), will anyone actually believe that they weren’t planted?
It would probably be helpful if everyone could avoid the “Bush is Satan” and “Bush is the Savior of Everything Pure and Good” stances in this thread.
After all the lies? Not a chance. The only evidence that will make a difference to me now is huge quantities of weaponised materials along with a delivery system capable of reaching the UK, prefrably one ready to go at 45 minutes notice, and verified by UN inspectors.
I’m too deafened by the incessant cries of wolf do do otherwise.
I’m expecting them to produce handy “evidence” sooner or later.
Whatever WMD’s may have existed are in terrorist hands now, thanks to this incompetently fought war and fitful peace. Frankly, as the allies showed no interest in securing supposed WMD sites I think they knew it was bullshit all along.
It’s getting to an interesting stage. The CIA is pissed off that the military can’t find anything, so the CIA is going in to do the job “right”. CIA muscles in on WMD search
See, the military just doesn’t look hard enough or ask the right questions. Trust the Tenet and the CIA. As if.
As Michael Kinsley points out, it pretty much doesn’t matter at this point. Whether they’re found or not, the US public doesn’t care. A good portion think they’ve already found some (maybe Bush’s extremely cynical misleading statement in Poland has something to do with that?) The truck angle has fizzled. But even if they do find something now, it wont be because they had good intelligence supporting it.
Well, it doesn’t matter in the sense that the knuckle draggers don’t care and the bleeding hearts who do care already knew. Like the election of 2000, the issue is so polarized that the facts themselves are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I will, however, point out one salient fact which often gets overlooked in these debates. If the Bush Administration were really so willing to deceive and manufacture evidence as some of us have intimated, there wouldn’t be a problem now because we would have found something. The very fact that they are openly disclosing that they aren’t finding anything is a small indication that there is still an element of integrity left in Bush’s Presidency.
That indicates to me that President Bush was willing to take a big, big risk to get done what he wanted to get done, facts be damned. But at least he’s also honest enough to… try to weasel out of his apparent mistake rather than to overtly plant evidence.
Here’s the funny thing: the only way the President can even be partially excused for this mess in my own mind is if we never find those weapons. The minute we find something after all this time, I’ll be suspicious.
If evidence does show up, particularly if it is announced at an opportune time (my money is on the weekend before the Democratic Convention), I will always wonder if the President changed his mind about not planting evidence. There is a fine line between misrepresentation of facts and outright deception. I’m reasonably certain now that the President was willing to misrepresent the facts. At this point, finding something won’t even begin to vindicate him in my eyes until I’m fully convinced that it’s not an attempt to deceive.
And even then, I doubt I’ll see it as a vindication in light of the gross misrepresentation and incompetent diplomacy which got us into this mess in the first place.
Depends on who finds them, how they found them, and whether or not the find is independently verified. For instance, if US forces claim to have found a massive cache of anthrax in an underground Baghdad bunker, but no one else is allowed to inspect the find, there will be a lot of skepticism from the rest of the world.
Of course, if we find anything – even if it’s an ancient copy of Baghdad Bob’s Junior Home Chemistry Kit – you can bet the Bushistas will be waving it around for a massive bout of self-congratulations.
A big cache is found in the desert. Whether it’s found by the CIA, US Armed Forces, or even the Brits. Will it matter? Every independent verification in the world could happen…would anyone actually believe it?
Depends how big a cache. I don’t trust Bush but I’m no conspiricy nut either. Any scrap found would be a huge political victory for Bush though. As long as he gets something he can point at he’ll be able to convince most of the american public. As to why he hasn’t faked it already, there is no need he’s feeling no real domestic heat on the issue, this could change but right now there is no reason to take the risk.
Keep in mind that, at least according to a recent poll, a third of the American public believes that WMDs have already been found, or even more depressingly, 22% believe that Iraq used them during this recent war.
The Program on International Policy Attitudes, recently released the results of a poll, carried out during May 14-18, asking a number of questions on the war in Iraq. Among the results:
Q9. Is it your impression that Iraq did or did not use chemical or biological weapons in the war that just ended?
Iraq did…22%
Iraq did not…69%
(No answer)…9%
Q10. Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?
“Among Republicans who said they follow international affairs very closely – and thus may also be more exposed to headlines reporting promising leads – an even larger percentage – 55% – said weapons have been found, with just 45% saying they have not.”
Cognitive dissonance, indeed.
A mea culpa, I believed that Iraq had an ongoing WMD program based not so much on the administration’s claims as a history of such claims from a variety of sources. If chemical weapons are WMD–eh?–“Saddam used them, blah, blah.” “He got the germ samples from the US…” He was “six months from a nuke in the early 1980s.”
If I recall I think I based my hesitant support for the war on a desire to get rid of Saddam and end the sanctions at once. But, I argued that he had some kind of WMD program. I figured he might have thousands of gallons of precursers laying around, ready mix if you will.
So, would I accept evidence? Well, of course, yes. And, no. Now I want a strict chain of custody, witnesses to the discovery, and lots more criteria met to be enumerated later according to the nature of the discovery.
Who knows what’s really going on? I’d prefer that Bush was a big liar than many of the alternatives.
Damn, but those statistics are depressing, alenar. Very depressing.
To answer the OP, at this point I would believe a significant WMD find if and only if it was verified independently of those who have a horse in the race, so to speak. Tony Blair, and to some extent the Bush Administration, are gambling large chunks of their political future on the results of the search for WMD in Iraq. If only for that reason alone, I’d prefer an independent body of nations (the UN comes to mind) that could independently examine and verify any finds made by the “coalition” troops.
The pile of misdirection and misinformation coming from those who “sold” the war to the public is getting bigger and bigger, to the point that I simply don’t trust what they tell me any more. I can’t trust it.
It’s gonna take hard evidence for me to believe anything, but that doesn’t matter. A majority of the people I know (this is just my opinion on what I have witnessed where I live, no cite) of Americans believe that we have already found WMD. When told that we haven’t they reply with but didn’t you see how happy they were? Tearing down all those pics of Saddam and whatnot. That’s not why we were told we were going to war.
If you gave an independent UN inspector team free rein to check it out, and they corroborate the find, then yes, most folks in the world would believe it. Despite what Bush and the Republicans might think, the UN still has a lot of respect from the rest of the planet.
I was and am still expecting/hoping thatsome will be found. Of course my doubt increases everyday that they aren’t found.
Today I learned, interestingly enough, that Clinton’s version of the ObL-SH connection worked the other way around with ObL as the supplier of VX nerve gas precursor, empta, and SH as the recipient. We bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan mistakenly to prevent ObL from giving the WoMD that he already had to SH who didn’t have them.
I guess that’s the difference between Dems and Repubs.
As to what the rest of th eworld would think…
There’s a certain portion of the population that’d never belive anything coming out of the Bush White house. A slightly smaller portion who’d never believe anything coming out of the White House period. I think that many people who’re riding the fence would be willing to accept the find as fact.
It might lessen the US’s loss of credibility, so I hope we do find the WoMD and quickly w/ independent verification.
I came across an interview with Hans Blix a few days ago, where he claimed that inspectors never have found any undeclared WMD’s, not even during 1991-98.
I have always though that after G.W. I (in 1991) the inspectors moved in, and went from site to site and destroyed or sealed what they found. Then at the end they made a list of what they had found and what they expected to find - and found some discrepancies.
According to Blix everything they found back then was on locations declared upfront by the regime. Go reckon. Is it so?
Another interesting quote from the site: