As usual, quickly dashed. So, just so’s we know, what kind of threat was he, actually? Seeing as he didn’t have all these weapons,what was he going to threaten us with? A secret cadre of necromancers, practicing Sufi voodoo? A stern talking to?
He had squat, Mojo. As in diddly. His “elite Guard” would have been bitch-slapped all over the Godforsaken Desert by Italy, if they had a mind to. What threat could he pose to the most powerful military machine in human history? With his own two widdle pink paddy paws? Maybe if he hired Samuel L. Jackson, took private lessons, maybe he could eyeball us to death.
Because he didn’t have anything else. You did get that part, right? No nuclear anthrax armed invisible pink unicorns of Doom. No intercontinental drones. No new fragance to market to unsuspecting shoppers at Bloomies, called “Writhe on the Floor, Froth at the Mouth and Die!!”
I don’t much like it when people don’t like me, Mojo. But I only worry about people who can hurt me. I’m a reasonable sort of fellow, someone can glower at me and shake his fist, and I won’t gun him down. Maybe I’m a bit of a wussy that way, but it seems reasonable enough to me.
He shot some bottle rockets at some jets and never hit anything. It was mostly a symbolic gesture of defiance and it did not not constitute a direct threat to the US.
Allegedly he gave some money to some families of suicide bombers in Israel. It’s a stretch to call that a “sponsorship” of anybody who was trying to hurt the US. Remember, to justify an attack on sovereignty, the UN Charter requires that it be done in self-defense, not as revenge on behalf of some whole other country.
Kuwait? You’re actually suggesting that the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 (which you may recall from your history books was dealt with at the time, actually constituted some sort of threat to the US thirteen years later?
Come ON. Is that the best you can do?
You haven’t actually identified any threats, Moto. Sorry, but you haven’t. The UN Charter requires that an attack on sovereignty (not just military retaliation for something, but the actual overthrow of a government) can only be justified by genuine self-defense. Even the “imminent threat” definition of self-defense is a Bush administration formulation of dubious validity.
Like the things necessary for proper water treatment.
Care to share the explicit details?
IIRC, re the nuclear program this entailed some scientist suspecting that another scientist had had thoughts of making plans to make plans to revive the program. Mind you, they weren’t sure that he had had these impure thoughts, but they suspected him of them.
Of course they were kept employed, they were civil servants. Ever see the paperwork necessary to fire a cvil servant?
“… hit the ground running when sanctions ended” because they were not running.
He was disarmed of “these particularly nasty weapons”. Btw, which ones specifically are you talking about?
“The scope of all this” is not what revealed the fundamental dishonesty of Team Bush’s case for war. Nor, was it ‘automatic’. Rather it was the Team Bush’s deliberately warped presentation that revealed the fundamental dishonesty (or ‘imprecision’ if you’d rather).
Firstly, thanks for the response. I appreciate you remaining engaged in the thread so we can do some analysis on the facts available to us through various channels and both of us come out with a better understanding of, if nothing else, how we each see the situation.
I agree, with the all important caveat of “broadly speaking”. Under the sanctions regime there were items the regime could import which could be used for production of banned weapons. Fortunately there was also, under the pre-war framework, an inspections team who could monitor the use of these dual-use items and see if they were being put to banned use. They had destroyed or rendered inoperable a large number of actual weapons as well as the equipment needed to produce them. Conventional ordinance which could serve as components of banned weapons was being inventoried, tracked, and sealed. This seems an effective check to the ability to import dual-use equipment and use it in a prohibited manner.
Unless you share his lack of confidence in the will of the rest of the world, then this is a non-starter. The US, UK, and UN had kept up pressure and inspections were ongoing during the pre-war timeframe. The Duelfer Report details the manners in which the desires of Hussein to regain NBC weapons were frustrated by both sanctions and inspections. More than anything else it shows that the sanctions and inspections had worked. His ambitions were thwarted. No matter how much he wanted NBC weapons, the sanctions and inspections were preventing it and he knew it. All of the programs were dormant or had decayed since the end of Gulf War I(during the timeframe of sanctions and inspections). If I were to summarize the Duelfer report in two sentences, I would do it thusly.
Containment via sanctions and inspections has been effective in preventing the Iraqi regime from acquiring WMD. Hussein’s ambitions for non-conventional weapons, while still present, have been unable to overcome the physical and economic barriers represented by sanctions and inspections.
What particularly nasty weapons? The ones which existed in his dreams? Where he’s a Viking? The equipment in a machine shop is not “particularly nasty weapons”.
Here’s where we can’t talk in broad strokes anymore. If there is a claim that Hussein needed to be disarmed, then it implies he was armed in the first place. Please cite the sections of the Duelfer report, or something somewhat authoratative, which mentions physical weapons. Then show how those weapons represent a threat to the US or its vital national interests.
Here’s the facts as I see them. By the way, this was my pre-war assessment as well. Post GWI Iraq was placed under sanctions and delivered up a manifest showing 90%+ of their non-conventional weapons had been destroyed. Over the next 12 years the less than 10% which was missing from that manifest was whittled down substantially by inspections and kept from being built back up by sanctions. Hussein remained a major asshole and would probably have tried to re-create his stockpiles of WMD if he could. But, and this is the important part, he could not. As in, was physically unable to. This was due to sanctions and inspections, which, as the Duelfer report shows, HAD WORKED.
Now I get to show off my own prescience(which really wasn’t anything of the kind. I had simply read the reports coming out of the inspectors offices, publically-available intelligence estimates, and the pre-war justifications presented to the UN and Congress). This is from March 19th, 2003 the day the shooting started.
a variety of assembled and non-assembled “super-gun” components
38,537 filled and empty chemical munitions
690 tonnes of chemical weapons agent
more than 3,000 tonnes of precursors chemicals
426 pieces of chemical weapons production equipment
91 pieces of related analytical instruments
the entire Al-Hakam, the main biological weapons production facility
a variety of biological weapons production equipment and materials
This constitutes “exactly zero progress” ? I’d say that even without comparison to the dirty little war you and yours were clamoring for, this is pretty damn amazing progress. (I believe the war so far has led to the discovery of 70-some pre-1991 pieces of chemical munition, none of which were usable.)
The word of the US ? As sad as it is, Powell’s presentation to the UN will be considered the yardstick of “your words” for a long, long time to come. “Worthless puffs of air” seems to describe those very nicely.
For the benefit of those who don’t read every thread, this is a reference to my objection starting here and most specifically here to people on the left marching in “anti-war” protests which are really thinly-disguised hate-America rallies organized by the trotskyite group International ANSWER. I encouraged and continue to encourage people to learn about the sponsors of “anti-war” rallies before marching under a banner which they oppose. Having learned, ElvisL1ves and elucidator have made their choices clear – they would march behind anybody so long as they were anti-Bush in some way. (Elucidator: “We don’t care who got the permit, somebody who either is or knows a lawyer, we guess, and could n’t care less!”)
Happily, others are getting the message and coming to their senses. Here’s an open letter from United for Peace and Justice, another anti-war group. They declined to co-sponsor the “anti-war” rally in Central Park this weekend precisely because of their concerns with the permit holders at ANSWER and their parent organizations the International Action Center and the Worker’s World Party. UFPJ itself is a group so radical that they can’t bring themselves to be againt the insurgency for fear of offending some of their coalition members and even they are unwilling to march with people who so clearly support that insurgency. Instead, they put their resources into a demonstration of their own making and into an interfaith service. Unlike elucidator, the Vice-Chair of the Communist Party USA does care who got the permit, and they were too radical for her.
So that’s good news. Even as I oppose UFPJ, I applaud their willingness to stand up against the anti-American radicals who organize many of these alleged anti-war rallies and I encourage others on the left to follow their lead.
Wow, just wow. I haven’t heard anyone worrying about Trotskyists (I thought only the Stalinist wing called them Trotskyites) since Cambridge Massachussetts in 1969, when some of my chicken shit radical friends cared about such things.
That’s the greatest menace we face in the US today - Trotskyists.
Or maybe he’s flashed back to City College in the '30s.
Right now I’m a lot more concerned about the impact of Bush and the GOP, who are after all running the country, than I am about some splinter group that has negligible influence. The first thing to do is take a stand against the evil that is actually happening, in Iraq and in the American gulag (horrifying that this phrase actually has meaning), and in the unlikely event that, at some later time, the kooks who organized the protest have enough influence to actually be noticed, I’ll worry about that then.
Bush has allied himself with the likes of Pakistan (motto: “Nukes ‘R’ Us!”) and Putin. Why is it only his opponents who are expected to be free of questionable connections?
Man, you go away for a while from the StraightDope and come back to find out that Bush supporters are now bragging about Iraqi weapons sites being looted as if this was some sort of good thing.
I suppose if Bin Laden surfaces and announces that he has chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons that were looted from Iraq following the U.S. invasion that will even be more proof of the importance and success of our invasion?
So you have nothing on the actual topic to advance? Just criticism of those anti-war groups you have determined, using your own guidelines, to be “anti-American”? Because the topic of the OP was a fact-based question about WMD and WMD infrastructure, not the motives or actual effect of various anti-war groups. You have labeled the equipment described in the OP’s linked article as “‘shadow’ WMD infrastructure” and I asked you a direct question about what that means and how it represented a threat to the US or vital national interests which must be dealt with by pre-emptive war. Do you have any interest in discussing that issue? Whatever the movies, or actual on-the-ground effects, of the anti-war groups are, they certainly aren’t relevant to a discussion of the non-conventional ordinance stockpiles or means of production in pre-war Iraq.
“Shadow” WMD infrastructure is just what I said it was – material and (more directly and more importantly) personnel infrastructure which Iraq maintained with the intention of resuming its WMD program if the pre-invasion sanctions were to be lifted absent a change in the regime. There really isn’t any substantial doubt that this infrastructure existed; we can discuss it further if you’re willing to state that you’ve read the entire Duelfer report and not just news reports about it. I was merely opining that if the story turns out to be accurate (and, to repeat, I encouraged healthy skepticism about its accuracy as I would any report out of a war zone) that that infrastructure may have been more extensive and more ready to go than previously thought.
Do I wish to re-argue the entire war? Not really. In particular I have no interest in hearing about “international law” from people who didn’t support the vigorous enforcement through military action those UN resolutions which Iraq clearly violated. That includes persons from within the UN, BTW.
Shodan, not for nothing, but please take any complaints about the moderation of this website to the Pit and more specifically please trust me to raise any objections I might have on my own. Thanks.
Oh my Og! They had infrastructure!? Why didn’t somebody say so! “Vast stockpiles of intrastructure”, that would surely have roused a somnolent America to urgent emergency action! You mean they had, like, machinery and chemicals and people with PhD.'s? Gasp!
Who the hell doesn’t have infrastucture? I can tell you somebody damn sure got infrastructures, and that’s our good buddy, loyal True Blue Odious Cologny Pakistan, we know they got infrastructure, cause they’ve been holding a nuclear Amway sale for years! And what did we do when we found out? “Well, that’s an internal matter in Pakistan, none of our beezwax, real threats are kind of out of our purview, we’re into chimera, mostly…”
OK, why didn’t Saddam resume his WMD program in 1999 or 2000 or 2001? The inspection regime from the early and mid-1990s had ceased. This description of Saddam’s intent makes no sense at all, unless you’re saying Saddam manufactured WMDs during the 1998-2002 period, or was prescient about Bush’s election in 2000 and post-election intentions towards Iraq.
