What do WMD’s and God have in common? You can’t prove they don’t exist. What MAKES something a WMD is it’s size. How hard is it to hide 50,000 cubic feet of weapons?
We killed more people with a thousand planes over Dresden than 1 plane over Hiroshima. The weapon that destroyed Hiroshima would fit nicely in the back of a pickup truck.
The mobile labs were a no-brainer. We gave Saddam years to create a mobile weapons R&D system (which the weapons inspectors actually photographed during one of their “surprise” inspections).
Finding them is not a matter of looking at the odd location hoping they will turn up. It will take an eye witness to point them out. Not sure what the life span of an eye witness is/was under the old regime, but time will tell.
Saddly I thnik that BrightNShiny is very accurate on his evaluation of what constitutes impeachment material. However, since US soldiers died there´s still some hope that Bush & Co. will be held accountable for it if the casus belli was forged.
BeatenMan wrote:
“Let’s see, Clinton said Iraq had wmd’s, the UN said Iraq had wmd’s, France, England, Iran said Iraq had them. Iraq stopped UN inspectors at gun point in 98 from searching buildings thought to have WMD’S. So your right, George w Bush should be impeached because he made the whole thing up. The WMD’S never did exist, never mind those thousands of people dead from the stuff. It is all Bush’s fault.”
I think that the important thing here is the use of “had”, Iraq had WMD for sure, if it still had them at the moment of the invasion is the issue.
Everyone agreed that Iraq has weapons of Mass Destruction, they had them when he used it on his own people (as can be shown by the 1,000’s of unmarked graves we’ve found .)
So what happened to them? Well they could be hidden in any number of places, Iraq isn’t a tiny country and to think that we were just going to find them right away is a joke.
What really saddens me the most about this whole thing is that we had to use WMD as an excuse for the Leftist’s and Democrat’s to agree that this was urgent. I believe that the way the Iraq people were tortured through out the reign of Saddam is more important then even the WMD. Why is it that American’s are suppose to only care about American lives? Thats exactly the reasoning behind alot of the middle east hatred towards us.
When 9/11 happened everyone was scorn and we basically insisted in invading Aphganistan, two years later we’ver basically forgotten all those who’d lost there lives over here and gone back in our merry ways. It’s unexcusable to treat human life so shallow and to just let a dicator treat the Iraq people in the same way is horrendous.
So for all the people that think this is an impeachable offense and worse then Watergate are just trying to pick away at Bush’s credibilty and only care about politics. I’m not necessary sure that was Bush’s no.1 reason for invading Iraq but it WAS 1 of 3 reasons he listed.
Besides the fact that Clinton was impeached for lying and disgracing the office…I don’t really grasp how people jump on Bush for at least attempting to bring about peace.
Cite for a fact that any of the newly-discovered unmarked graves contained a WMD victim? I’ve seen none, but rather have seen suggestions they are probably Shiites who rebelled in ‘91 and had their rebellion crushed, most likely by being shot, not gassed.’’
I think the argument you are trying to make about using WMDs on “his own people” involves a completely separate incident during the Iran-Iraq war in which chem. weapons were used on secessionists who Iraq believed were supporting Iran. As others have/will point[ed] out, such an incident does not particularly support the Administration’s urgent claims in 2003 that war was necessary to keep WMDs from being deployed against the U.S. imminently (or, as Tony Blair’s govt. put it, “within 45 minutes”).
Really? In other words, as opposed to the “Leftists and Democrats”, the Republicans/Right care about lives, other than American lives.
Where was this attitude during the 80’s, when Saddam was certainly in power and Reagan, “The Great Liberator” was President? To hear the Right tell it, our Armed Forces was much larger “before Clinton gutted the military.” Our Fighting Men could have rolled into Iraq in a week and brought Freedom to the poor oppressed masses.
Why didn’t we?
Don’t give me a load of crap about how the Right puts people above politics, okay?
The difference between Clinton and Bush (and I’m not even going near the UN, France, or England) is that Bush acted on this information. Clinton did not. Bush made executive decisions based on the belief that WMDs existed. This isn’t a slap on the head, “Boy, was I an asshole” kind of thing. Coalition servicemembers were killed in this little affair, as were Iraqis. If it turns out there were no WMDs, Bush is going to have a lot to answer for, and I don’t think Karl Rove and Rummy are going to be able to protect him.
Clinton stated some weeks before the invasion that if Iraq had WMD, an invasion would likely result in those weapons falling into the hands of terrorists.
I hope he was wrong.
I hope Bush was lying, and that there were no WMD there. Otherwise, when the other shoe drops it could make a very big noise.
I agree. OTOH if it turns out that Saddam did have a WMD program and that he was torturing and murdering thousands of people, then Bush is going to deserve an awful lot of credit.
Only if the WMDs are still in Iraq. If they wind up killing people in NYC because of their piss-poor post-war planning, (no charge for the alliteration) well, if I’m still alive, I’m going to make sure he answers for it.
On further reflection, I’m going to have to revise my initial opinion, because I think I’m conflating two issues, one of which doesn’t really exist anymore:
Domestic vs. International: Given that the “War on Terrorism” has moved home and with the increased communications capability and globalization of the economy, I’m not sure it’s proper anymore to draw a distinction between domestic vs. international issues. That leaves us with:
Personal gain vs. Acting in the Best Interests of Americans: This I think still applies. My feeling is that a President who takes an action (either domestically or internationally) for which he can make the argument that it was done for America’s best interests, will not be impeached.
So, even if Bush outright lied to Congress under oath, I simply cannot picture impeachment proceedings beginning. As long as there is no tangible, direct personal gain, I think Congress will be loathe to impeach and the American people will simply shrug it off.
There is the issue of American deaths, but many people are viewing this as an extension of a war that began on 9/11. So, for this point of view, Americans are already dying, and this war is to prevent further deaths? Something like that, I think.
And of course, something does not become an impeachable offense until Congress says it does. Without pressure from the population to do so, why would they?
No. His war plan treated their existence or nonexistence as inconsequential.
The only way in which Bush used the WMD infor was as an excuse to invade Iraq, for whatever mysterious reasons he had.
The question of whether there were WMDs has in fact been reversed in terms of its political consequences. (See my earlier post.) But Bush does have a lot to answer for, because his war plan didn’t treat WMDs as a significant objective, so our troops gaily waved as they passed prospective WMD sites on their lists as they drove to Baghdad, and left the prospective WMDs to be looted.
Like I keep saying, if there were no WMDs, Bush is just a lying scoundrel who deserves impeachment. If there were WMDs, he has betrayed us into the hands of our enemies, and the penalty for that is traditionally much higher.
Rummy, as the personal architect of the “let’s see how few troops we can take Baghdad with” war plan, might be able to protect Bush by claiming he revised the war plan without Bush’s knowledge. It’s possible.
Here they seem to be laying the ground work for saying that the only thing they need to show is a “program” (whatever that might look like), though Fleischer backpedals a bit when called on it.
The claim was that large stores of materials were being accumulated and were available for planned use against the U.S. and its “friends and allies.”
The Brits claimed that Saddam was in a position to launch a WMD attack “within 45 minutes.”
It’s looking to me like claims of this variety are already effectively unviable. I think we’re already at a second or third order fallback trench vis a vis the strongest claims made by the Coalition.
Would American or Brit populace have supported the war last Fall, or this Spring, if the threat had been couched as “Saddam is Really Mean, plus he has (or had) a WMD ‘program’” – full stop?
I don’t know. I think maybe no. And one does wonder why (if that were a sufficient justification or sales pitch) they didn’t just go with it, as it would have been a lot safer position to take.
I suspect next week the Bush Administration will turn up three Iraqi chemistry textbooks and a bunsen burner, then cite those as “Saddam’s WMD program.” :rolleyes:
And hey, what about that “Circle of Death” that was supposedly drawn around the map of Baghdad? Remember all those reporters on Fox News breathlessly telling us how American forces would be risking life and limb the moment they stepped across the line, since that’s surely when Saddam would unleash his WMDs and gas the troops? Nobody was talking about “weapons programs” then, were they?
Normally I would hope that any President would be impeached under the circumstances, or that at least a special prosecutor would be appointed to figure out what was going on in the leadup to the war.
But if you ask me, we’ve already gone through this, and Bush got away scot-free. Remember all that talk about Bush’s mishandling of 9-11? Remember the FBI agents who said Bush squelched investigations into the Saudi connection? Or the talk of how Bush knew that Al-Qaeda was going to carry out terrorist attacks involving hijackings, but nothing was done beyond making sure that Bush and his cronies didn’t fly on 9-11?
My prediction is that if Iraqi uranium is used to make a dirty bomb, it will actually rebound in Bush’s favor. Bush will trumpet it as proof of Iraqi WMD’s, proof that Iraq passed them to Al-Qaeda, and proof that Bush could have stopped them if only the liberals and the UN hadn’t gotten in the way.
If WMD does not show up, there is a big problem with credibility. Even if Al-Qaeda does have some, for me it does not prove anything or work in favor of anyone in the US government (unless they bust up the plot before it can be used, then some credit must be given to someone).
You can’t have an independent counsel appointed anymore. They got rid of that law and so Congress has no authority to do such things anymore. I think it was changed before Clinton left office, but I am not sure.
I think a vast majority of people in the US will forget that we even put troops in Iraq by 2004. A lot of people don’t even remember what happened on 9/11/2001 anymore.