Adding to what, tom already said, I think the quote speaks for itself. If you’ll concede that Wolfowitz was one of the major architech’s of the Iraq invasion, and further, that this had been in the works for quite sometime, I find the statement highly revealing. In essence, he is saying that the US knew jack* about Iraq’s involvement prior to the invasion. Which is exactly what they/you presented as “evidence” for the rest of the world to see.
Adding to what, tom already said, I think the quote speaks for itself. If you’ll concede that Wolfowitz was one of the major architech’s of the Iraq invasion, and further, that this had been in the works for quite sometime, I find the statement highly revealing. In essence, he is saying that the US knew jack* about Iraq’s involvement prior to the invasion. Which is exactly what they/you presented as “evidence” for the rest of the world to see.
This whole Saddam/OBL thing reminds me of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Except that people don’t die in the game version.
I asked for a cite.
The idea of this board is to fight ignorance (that includes ludicrous unsupported allegations).
Please make an effort to do so.
I asked you:
Do you know who put Saddam in charge in Iraq?
Do you know where he got his weapons of mass destruction from?
Presumably you are ignorant that the answers are ‘the CIA’ and ‘Donald Rumsfeld, on behalf of the previous Bush administration’ respectively.
Does this information matter to you?
(Note that the UN previously passed resolutions deploring Saddam - the previous Bush Administration both put him in power and armed him.)
Yes, the UN would not back the immediate invasion of Iraq, because there was doubt that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (especially ones ready to use in 45 minutes, plus a nuclear link, supplied from Africa). Since the US took control of the country, months have passed without any WMD being found. The African plutonium documents have been exposed as forgeries.
Does this bother you at all?
And of course it is the Bush Administration who are saying ‘it doesn’t matter if there were WMDs - the War was justified anyway’.
Does this mean you think that Bush is left-wing?
BTW is the “special report” pathetic or what? It seems to be mainly a series of talking points with very little in the way of detail or context. Can’t the administration do a proper report with historical background,detailed statistics, analysis of the problems, specific targets and estimates of the resource needed to meet those targets? It’s better to release nothing rather than this junk.
Boy, talk about lying! Mujahedin-e-Khalq were mostly inactive, but their only target was Iran (one our “bad” guys) and, as soon as we got into Northeast Iraq, we recruited them to join us (after a token disarmament).
According to the U.S. (in other documents), Abu Nidal had forsworn terror by the mid-1990s and their last actual action was an assassination in Jordan of someone they considered to have betrayed them (i.e., internecine gang warfare, not a terrorist act against another country).
So, we are taking credit for having “stopped” one group by simply recruiting them to work for us and for another group that has been retired for ten years.
I realize that it is a waste of my time to argue with the White House’s oft-repeated rationale for war, as others have done so far more effectively at far better times. That said, I’m a freaking masochist:
x[sup]2[/sup] + y[sup]2[/sup] = r[sup]2[/sup]
Two and three do not merit a response, except to say that the NBC weapons issue has been dealt with at length by many (myself included), and that three sent my irony meter off the scale.
If the White House truly does not understand that pre-war Iraqi Kurdistan was not under Baghdad’s control, I am going to cry.
I would also note that “Law enforcement and intelligence operations have disrupted al Qaida associate Abu Musab Zarqawi’s poison plotting in France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia” held true before the Bush Administration did everything in its power to royally piss off the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of such nations. Ironically, France and Germany were perhaps our two most useful allies in operations again Al-Qaa:ada prior to the Iraq war. Sadly, uch cooperation was clearly not helped by the White House’s approach to that damned fool war.
9: Zarqawi was involved in the Foley assassination:
This is truly unfortunate, but where the hell is the evidence that Zarqawi was working with Saddam Hussain?
On preview, I see that tomndebb has saved me the trouble of dealing with the MKO BS. Thanks, tom.
Note that in point 6, they talk about disrupting the training camp at Sagrat–carefully omitting that no documents linking it to Iraq were found and that it was able to operate because the U.S. was keeping the Iraqi Army out of the region,
then, in point 8, they talk about how Zarqawi had been producing poison weapons “before the war”–carefully not mentioning that the same site, Sagrat, mentioned in point 6 has no chemical or biological weapons associated with it.
While the Reagan Administration most likely gave tacit support to Iraqi use of NBC weapons during the Iran-Iraq War, there is absolutely no evidence that the United States ever supplied Baghdad with such weapons. Indeed, Iraq has never possessed many US-made weapons of any kind. All the evidence that I am aware of indicates that Iraqi NBC weapons were either indigenous or were largely acquired from the USSR and (in the case of the nuclear program), various sources in Western Europe.
The closest link one can make between the United States and Iraqi unconventional weapons programs would be that Baghdad ordered commercially-available bacteria from a private supplier in the US in the 1980s, if I recall correctly.
The Central Intelligence Agency had absolutely nothing to do with either the 1969 Ba’ath Party coup or Saddam’s own 1979 bloodbath, and I have never encountered any evidence to the contrary. The Ba’ath Party was far friendlier with the Soviet Union than the United States, and prior to 1979 our Twin Pillars in the region were Saudi Arabia and Iran (Iraq’s enemy, obviously). The US did not begin its “tilt” towards Baghdad until the advent Iran-Iraq War.
No. We know that our administration was lying because reports from the State Department and the CIA prior to the administration’s re-writing of history indicated that he had retired. For example, this official U.S. site notes his lack of activity: http://library.nps.navy.mil/home/tgp/abu.htm
“there is absolutely no evidence that the United States ever supplied Baghdad with such weapons”
The CDC sent several samples of germs to Iraq in the 80’s including botulinum toxin. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-09-30-iraq-ushelp_x.htm
There is another story linked in the second paragraph with more details.
Iraq claimed that the samples were needed for public health purposes but as the weapons inspector ,who is quoted, says this was pretty naive to believe even at the time.
I believe that this is the same incident I remembered as Iraq receiving bacteria specimens from a private US supplier, but my memory is clearly off if I confused a private supplier with the CDC. Thanks again for setting me straight.
Nevertheless, I maintain that any assertion that the US was responsible for Iraq’s unconventional weapons program (at least to any significant degree), or for the rise of Saddam Hussain, is completely unsupported by the facts.
I might be hijacking the thread… but its curious that people are still looking for justification for the war NOW. Justification should have been provided BEFORE not AFTER. (Taking down Saddam is not justification in itself thou… not for an occupation.)
Another thing is the debate about bad intelligence on Iraqi capabilities and true WMD program. News magazines and analysts talk about it as if Bush had made a hasty decision based on bad information… when it was in fact a decision that was backed by ANY information that fit.
Iraq was the target and the justification had to be made up anyway they could… intelligence was selected in order to fit the chosen scenario not the other way around.
This lack of activity may have something to do with his being dead.
Doesn’t sound like he was much of a threat, being dead and all, nor does it sound like he was being harboured by Iraq, especially seeing as how they killed him.
So for GWB to include that as one of the “10 Ways the Liberation of Iraq Supports the War on Terror” shows some pretty fucking strange logic, to say the least.
“my memory is clearly off if I confused a private supplier with the CDC.”
Your memory isn’t necessarily off; as the article mentions there was a company called the ATCC which also supplied samples along with the CDC.
As for the rest I guess it depends on what you mean by “responsible”. It’s quite possible that some US officials knew that the samples would help the Iraqi bio-weapons efforts but turned a blind eye because Iraq was then an ally. It’s hard to prove one way or another.
About the links between CIA and Saddam here is an interesting UPI article though there are conflicting statements about whether the CIA was behind the 1963 Baath Party coup. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2849.htm
Abu Nidal died in 2002. The last time that the U.S. intelligence suspected his group of an attack was in Jordan in 1994. The last time the U.S. intelligence confirmed an attack was in 1991 (against the PLO). And the last time that any attack was carried out against people other than PLO enemies or suspected Arab enemies was in the late 1980s.
