did you even bother to verify the source of this information? It is not sufficient, that it was printed in the NYT.
Dr. Sami Al Araji is currently the only person that talks about this systematic looting. Not even his own ministry does comment on that matter and there is no other person supporting his opinion.
Also Dr. Sami Al Araji has a history in Iraq’s government. He already worked under Saddam Hussein for the government. He was part of Iraq’s propaganda about health effects of uranium ammunition used in the Gulf War 1991. He was also part of the negotians between IAEA, UN and Iraq, and personally responsible for removing nuclear fuel from Iraqi soil in 1999 (which obviously was never removed!). In 2003, just before the war he was the man of the Iraqi government, who monitored the UNMOVIC inspectors (he actually stalled their inspections, and supposedly hid material from them).
So given all this (which you can easily find through googling), do you still think he is a reliable source?
The US effort to find WMDs is over. The reports have been issued, and the closest anyone has come is the now famous “weapons development related programs”. When and if this changes, the administration will trumpet the results from the rooftops, and not rely on Hitch to be the sole voice of reason amid a sea of denials.
I always picture him as the last journalist still the bar in the wee AM hours at whatever hotel the ex-pat journalists stay, smoking cigarettes and asking the bartender to pour him another drink. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
You know, it is arguments like this that not only put the Great in Great Debates but actually make me rethink my entire political belief system. Well done sir! Well done!
Oh. So you’re saying that he said that it’s okay for politicians to subvert fundamental American democratic values and undermine the principles of representative government as long as it means Syria pulls out of Lebanon etc.?
‘Published last September, the dossier warned that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to activate his biological and chemical weapons in just 45 minutes.’
Funny how your source doesn’t mention these weapons. Have they found them yet? :rolleyes:
Defence Minister Adam Ingram rejected suggestions that the US-led coalition had effectively gone to war on a false pretext.
…
“The whole world knew what Saddam Hussein was up to in terms of the weapons of mass destruction and that’s why we prosecuted the war and that’s why we were right.”
Manhattan, so, rather than actually address any points made in the thread, including the fact that there STILL hasn’t been any actual WMD, or materials capable of being made into WMD, or any machinery that was actually capable of being used to make WMD, you claim other people are ignoring the facts.
As for the OP, I am glad that it turns out to be nothing more than a fart at the back of a city bus, because I would have hated for Scylla to have to eat crow for no good reason.
Perhaps your time could have been better spent putting forth a more erudite response to those very relevant points than “LALALALALALA…”. It might perhaps make your point more credible and not-stupid. It gets really hard as a neutral observer to not take sides on an issue when you see responses like this.
Now let’s be perfectly honest. This war was sold on the prospect of an armed and dangerous Saddam Hussein being able to attack the US or another ally within 45 minutes, ass glee pointed out. That was said again and again and again. It turned out to be wrong. This story has not changed things. Very relevant points have been made about why this is so. Can you address those? If so, great, let’s hear it (I like seeing good points from both sides, because I want a complete picture). If not, what useful purpose does LALALALALA serve other than to make you look like the best friend of a bully who belittles his victims after they’ve been beaten up. Do you respect that? I know I don’t.
Can we back up a second and agree on some ground rules? Perhaps a common definition for the term “WMD”? I propose this formulation. WMD must include Nuclear, Biological, or Chemical weapons. Extremely powerful conventional weapons, such as the stockpiles missing from Al Qaqaa, are still conventional weapons. Perhaps they could have been used as components of a non-conventional weapon, but they themselves did not constitute a banned weapon. If they had then the UN inspectors, who knew of the Al Qaqaa stores before the war, could have simply destroyed them as they did with so many other stores of banned weapons during the inspections timeframe. Similarly, equipment which could be, although no evidence has been presented that it was, used to manufacture unconventional weapons would not qualify as weapons, especially not stockpiles of weapons.
We’re never going to get any kind of reasonable determination unless we agree on what it is we are trying to prove or disprove. First there was a claim of “massive stockpiles” of unconventional weapons, specifically chemical and probably biological, as well as active programs which were nearing fruition for nuclear weaponry. Then the claim was programs to produce chemical and biological weapons, and a dormant, but capable, nuclear program. Now there is no evidence of even such programs, so the focus is on equipment which could be used in such programs, should such programs ever materialize.
This is very thin gruel and I would prefer to have some specifics to be able to evaluate if that isn’t too much trouble. Please post sections from pre-war arguements about what Saddam had and post-war assessments of what he had and present a logical arguement that the post-war facts on the ground bear out the pre-war assertions.
This NYT article doesn’t come close to being able to poke holes in the most authorative and comprehensive document thus produced on the status of WMD in pre-war Iraq, the Duelfer report. I quote from the Key Findings Section(pdf) of the Duelfer report.
So now the furor is because the equipment the ISG described as capable of “making-do” as substitutes for real chemical weapons production gear has been looted? I don’t see the link here between this and the pre-war claims. If this occurance is being considered as validating the pre-war claims of the administration please post the specific claims, preferably ones made by extremely senior Administration officials(cabinet members, President, VP, official WH spokesman, or the equivelant) in front of large or important audiences like the UN security council, the US Congress, or national radio/television addresses. This is not a hard and fast requirement, but this subset of pre-war assertions is the subset which can most credibly be called “the pre-war justifications”. Assertions made to small audiences by lower-ranking administration officials are plentiful and varied.
Can we get some common ground here so we can evaluate this revelation by the Minister of Industry against pre-war WMD claims? What is a WMD, in the context the term was used in the major pre-war arguements, and how does the missing equipment and ordinance in the article qualify?
My car has parts made out of aluminum… aluminum that could be used to manufacture missles. It also contains petrol… petrol that could be used as rocket fuel for missles. You could also hook an axle up to drive a machine lathe… a machine lathe used to make nuclear weapons. There’s also a fair bit of silicon… silicon that could be turned into navigational guidance chips for ICBMs!
Oh Nose!
Incidentally, my mom lives right down the road from a bomb factory… oh, sure, sure… they say it’s an agricultural supply store… but what other possible reason could they have for selling both diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate? Terrorists, the whole lot of 'em. They also sell ammunition that could be used in fully automatic Fnord! assault weapons Fnord!.
The report in the Times, on its own, is kind of thin gruel. Not entirely without use, but not satisfying either. I agree with the criticism that it does not establish that Iraq had an active WMD program at the time of the invasion.
I also agree with cynicism about the accuracy of the report. In fact, I encourage cynicism about the accuracy of pretty much any report that comes out of a war zone until some time has passed and reports have been corroborated. I’ve made that point in the past.
However, if the report turns out to be true it does seem to establish that Iraq had a more-developed “shadow” WMD infrastructure than is currently commonly believed. Both the nature of the materials the report talks about and, more importantly to me at least, the existence of a large infrastructure which knew exactly where to find the stuff and possessed the manpower and materials to remove it even after an invasion suggests to me that that same infrastructure was ready to get right to work in the event that instead of an invasion sanctions had been lifted on the country and scrutiny decreased – an outcome which many opponents of the Iraq war supported right up until war was imminent.
I continue to agree that the Bush administration erred in relying on intelligence about the Iraqi WMD program, in particular about its state of development, when they chose to make that their lead reason for the war and agree that they should continue to be criticized for it. Accordingly, I believe that the title of the OP is unwarranted. And as long as we’re leveling criticism at the US, the US and its allies did an atrocious job of safeguarding these sites and deserve to be called out on that, too.
However, the textual meat of the OP, that Bush did not lie, is correct and is further supported by the story if it turns out to be accurate. The overwhelming weight of the evidence is that the Bush administration had a good-faith basis to believe what it was saying about WMD in Iraq. People who offer otherwise at this point can safely be categorized with the crowd that believe Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor beforehand.
Persons who maintain that WMD was the only reason for the Iraq war are simply lying.
My initial post was intended as a derisive parody of the bitter-enders whom I correctly anticipated would come into this thread and make statements like Dio’s. Candidly, Iraq could discover and turn over to the UN a fully functioning battery of old Soviet ICBMs with anthrax-tipped warheads and powered by the blood of Kurdish babies and there would still be people who claim that BUSH@ll!burt0nLIED!!!
Simply a more multisyllabic way of saying “LALALALA”. You do know the story by now, and if not you have no excuse, of how strenuously the administration filtered its information, ignored what didn’t fit, eliminated caveats, denigrated those who tried to tell them things they didn’t want to hear, and refused all entreaties to let the inspectors fucking go find out the facts before proceeding with the predetermined decision to go to war (ref. PNAC - heard of them too?)
Tell us more about what “good faith” means to you, since you mention the term. Should be fascinating as well as entertaining. :rolleyes:
Some folks arejust more naturally inclined to think of politicians as trustable folks. It’s not manny’s fault if he sees no internal discrepency in the term ‘honest politician’.
When discussing a Republican, for him it’s a redundancy. When discussing a Democrat, for him it’s an oxymoron. Convinces nobody but the preconvinced, of course.
What is “‘shadow’ WMD infrastructure” and how exactly does/did it represent a threat to the US or its vital national interests which would necessitate pre-emptive war? Could you formulate an arguement to this effect which would pass muster when compared to the restrictions on aggressive war in the UN charter? Those restrictions carry the weight of US constitutional law as signed and ratified treaties.
Once you’ve got that down, could you estimate the percentage of support for the war which was likely to be based on the WMD justification and subtract it from the “pro” side of the pre-war polls showing how the population felt about the proposed invasion? This would give us a better picture of how the population, where the political power theoretically resides in a Democracy, felt about aggressive war waged for the sake of non-WMD justifications. I don’t have any pre-war data on how the populace felt about the “spreading democracy” justification for pre-emptive/aggressive war, but here is an AP/Ipsos poll from about a month ago.
We shouldn’t conduct foreign policy on the basis of a public opinion poll. In a representative democracy, the decision to go to war is placed in the hands of the representatives, and they gave authority to the President to proceed with measures against Iraq, with war a definite option.
The people had an opportunity to vote out politicians who voted against their wishes last Election Day. I don’t think this expression of the people’s will, the only one that counts, should be dismissed by reference to ephemeral polls.
