Why would he have to be prescient about Bush’s election?
I think he was simply trying to outlast the patience of the world in trying to get him to comply with the inspection regime.
He made it impossible for the inspectors to do their jobs in 1998, and nothing much happened (besides a few missiles, and it was clear that these were not aimed at him but at Ken Starr ).
He guessed - accurately, it would seem - that Clinton wasn’t much interested in forcing compliance. Maybe he figured Gore would be elected, and could be treated the same way. He knew pretty clearly that the French and Russians weren’t going to try to force the issue, and there were too many people at the UN who were profiting from the oil-for-food thefts to worry about that particular hot air society. He figured if he sat tight, he could continue to get away with it until the world threw up its hands and, either de facto or de jure, lifted the inspection regime and sanctions. Then back to business as usual. His ambition in life was probably to be Kim Jung-il - once he had significant WMDs, he could afford to dictate terms in a way he could not after losing the Gulf War.
Unfortunately for him, 9/11 went down. And Bush took a dim view of Saddam thumbing his nose at the inspection regime.
Even then, he was trying to play brinksmanship. Let the inspectors return, let them find as little as he thought he could get away with, and then push to get the sanctions and the inspections stopped. And start producing WMDs, either to sell or to threaten the region.
He was trying to ride the tiger, and it ate him.
None of this requires that he start producing WMDs the first instant he could. Although IIRC, the Blix report of 2002 mentioned that he had been trying to obtain rocket engines, and other forms of proscribed naughtiness.
He figured that after a dozen years and three Presidents, the world would run out of patience, and let him get back to business. He was right about the first part, and wrong on the second.
By this wonderful piece of apologist logic, police officers should simply arrest all known and suspected criminals, because they might commit a crime in the future.
I guess “evidence” is just one of those outdated concepts from the reality-based coalition, eh?
A couple of notes. I doubt anyone has read the entire Duelfer report from end-to-end. I have read the entire “Key Findings” section from the CIA website. This section is nineteen pages long. I have also delved into a few dozen pages each from chapters 5, 6, and 4 which contain details about the Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear programs(or lack thereof, to be more accurate) specifically. If you’re going to make reading the entire document(which is a thousand pages long) a pre-requisite for debate with one as learned as yourself(I say this because I doubt that you are asking me to read the entire report when you have not, that would be the mark of a cad) then I suspect you will be a very lonely guru upon your mountain.
I am quite clear on your usage of the label of “’shadow’ WMD infrastructure” meaning the equipment and personnel mentioned in the OP and in various places in the Duelfer report. The key component of my question remains unanswered however. How, exactly, did this “’shadow’ WMD infrastructure” pose a threat to the US or our vital national interests which could only be addressed by pre-emptive war. It seems to me that equipment sitting idle in a manufacturing plant could be monitored by inspectors or removed by inspectors if it were ever put into illicit use. If you have any instances of this equipment actually having been used for illicit purposes or the material goods(WMD stockpiles or WMD components, as opposed to theoretically dual-use materials/equipment) produced by these means then I welcome your bringing evidence to the table.
As to comments about vigorous military enforcement of UN resolutions, that is a manner for the UN to decide. If you or I decided that our local legislature had passed measures prohibiting prostitution but that we still saw streetwalkers and the police did not act vigorously enough(in our estimation) to remove them, then would it be acceptable for us to gun them down ourselves? Noble though the intentions may have been, vigilantee actions are not conducive to a peaceful community.
As for the personnel, do you suggest it would have been appropriate to forcibly remove those Iraqis who had knowledge of methods of manufacture which could produce WMD? Essentially kidnap large portions of the engineers in Iraq and forcibly re-locate them to keep them from ever using their knowledge to benefit Saddam’s ambitions? This would have the side effect of crippling their industrial capacity in general, regardless of what they were manufacturing/maintaining, as well as being a gross violation of human rights. Still I don’t see any other way to remove the “personnel infrastructure which Iraq maintained with the intention of resuming its WMD program” if sanctions were lifted. Is the forced removal of Iraqis with engineering knowledge indeed your answer to this particular dilemma, or did you have some other solution in mind?
Mtgman, I’ve re-ordered your comments to make it easier for me to respond. Please be assured that in doing so I have no intent of trying to change the meaning of anything you’ve said. If you feel that I have done so I apologize in advance and encourage you to let me know so that I can apologize afterward, too.
This is fair criticism. Being a geek and having a big fat pipe to the home I have indeed read the whole thing. But you’re entirely correct; my insistence that others do so is unreasonable. A familiarity of the kind you describe and a willingness to read other relevant portions is more than sufficient for our purposes. My intent was to filter out queries like those made by others which make clear that the questioner has no intention whatsoever of going beyond whatever crud a blog has inflicted upon him. Thank you for the correction.
Here’s where I reordered your comments, because my response applies to both. No, of course I don’t expect forcible removal of Iraqi weapons scientists. But as the report makes clear, Saddam did much more than not deport people. He went to extensive measures to keep his weapons scientists together and happy. He encouraged them to retain knowledge for future application even as he instructed them to keep no written records. Beginning in about the 1999-2000 time frame, he vastly increased funding to weapons research programs, brought in technology and consulting scientists from “Russia, Belarus, Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, China, and several other countries” to bring his scientists current.
Ah, here I think you may be reading more into my comments than I intended. I offered nor offer any argument about the threat the infrastructure may or may not have posed, certainly at the time of invasion. I was merely offering analysis. Specifically, I’m offering that if the story turns out to be true than it indicates that the state of the infrastructure may have been stronger even than the already-strong state seen in the Duelfer report. If the personnel infrastructure was familiar with the material, they knew where to find it and they possessed sufficient resources to remove it when necessary then that indicates that the infrastructure was less compartmentalized and more organized than the authors of the Duelfer report believed. I will further offer that if it was indeed stronger, it weakens the argument against a pre-emptive war because the will to continue sanctions was clearly waning and that sooner or later they would have been lifted, clearing Iraq to resume its WMD program. To be clear again, I do not offer that a stronger shadow infrastructure is evidence of the kind of developed WMD program claimed by the world’s intelligence agencies or by the allies (or opponents, for that matter) prior to the invasion.
Again, I don’t wish to re-argue the Iraq war – we’ll never come to agreement and we’ll just be torturing hamsters. I will state my belief for the record. I believe that Iraq’s funding of suicide bombers against our ally Israel or its multi-year failure to cooperate with the inspectors they agreed to or indeed Iraq’s firing on US aircraft defending the no-fly zones each alone to be sufficient casus belli. Despite my low opinion of the UN, I believe that Iraq’s failure to comply with 1441 with it’s “final opportunity to comply” and its promise of “serious consequences” further strengthens the case. I further believe that in a just world the repression of the Iraqi people would be sufficient and I welcome the effort of the coalition to move the world in that direction and hope it continues. Indeed, that for me was and is the best reason of all. I don’t believe that murdering dictators deserve sovereignty, the existence of a multi-national organization which places murdering dictators on equal footing with democracies notwithstanding. As to your analogy, suffice it to say that I surrender some of my sovereignty to the State, whereas the United States has not surrendered sovereignty to the United Nations.
Now, about this nefarious “infrastructure”? What, precisely, is being said here?
Presumably, we are given to assume apparatus and technology for the production of very bad mojo. The term rather implies apparatus and technology specific to such production, no? Rather like super-duper centrifuges, the kind commonly found buried in rose gardens, are specific to the enrichment of uranium.
What, exactly, would such equipment be? Nerve gas, for instance, is not a particularly new scientific development, sarin precedes WWII, IIRC. The level of technology required would pose no challenge to Upper Volta or Chad. Hence, the existence of a “shadow WMD infrastructure” might be assumed to exist in virtually any moderately developed nation.
You can enlighten us on this particular point, being our expert on the Doofus Report. Was there specific mention of equipment that could be used solely for the production of WMD, having no other purpose? Reason I ask, I suspect that had a Veeblefetzer 9000 Sarin Incubator been found in Saddam’s garage, hidden behind the stack of old Playboys, that would have been prominently mentioned. I daresay one or another of the Usual Suspects might have mentioned such a thing. Pretty darn quick.
No? Then would we be entirely out of line to suggest that since this technology is so commonly known, the kind of equpment needed to produce such is equally common? Wouldn’t it then be remarkable if Saddam didn’t have such equipment? One might even go so far as to suggest that Mr. Dueffler, being entirely unable to produce anything concrete and substantial, was reduced to interpreting perfectly ordinary laboratory equipment and common chemical expertise as having some nefarious purpose.
I have a cat, and a two-by-four. Does that mean I have “shadow” violin production capacity?
I remember like it was yesterday the day that december said WMD programs instead of WMD’s. Slipped it in in the middle of a longish post, and nearly got away with it.
Now we’re down to shadows.
Lemme just say this:
Osama isn’t a shadow. Mullah Omar isn’t a shadow. Zawahiri is no shadow. Zarqawi, deliberately allowed to get away by this Admin before the Iraq War started, wasn’t and, as he has made abundantly clear now that he’s been allowed to do his dirty work, by this Administration, still isn’t, a shadow.
None of them are Trotskyists (ites? items?) either.
None of them have been caught. Which, of course, means that at the very least, the danger to this country and its overseas interests from these people has not been reduced at all by the Iraq War.
Scott Ritter was right, and Saddam had indeed gotten rid of his WMD’s. Just need to say this, given the title of this thread. Nothing in the Duelffer report contradicts either of those two flatly true statements. They remain true, despite these transparent attempts at obfuscation.
As it remains true that the Administration has yet to capture any of the Big Four, three and a half years after 9/11.
That of course remains true as well.
Truly, the apologists for this Administration get more pathetic every day.
There we disagree. I’d say it’s pretty damned clear that the Republicans’ obsession with Clinton’s penis and Monica’s mouth meant that they were paying no attention to what was going on in the wider world, even after two of our embassies got blown up, and anything Clinton did to respond to this threat was accordingly portrayed as “wagging the dog.”
OK, so you’re basically describing a deep, long-term game on Saddam’s part: he was content to wait several years after the inspectors were gone in order to make sure the attention of the world was really elsewhere, before he started developing a WMD program again.
If that’s manny’s or your contention, my remarks don’t apply: if Saddam wasn’t in a particular hurry to turn his country’s everyday technological capabilities and scientific know-how into infrastructure for producing WMDs, then he didn’t need to be prescient about anything. But then Saddam ceases to be the boogeyman who could unleash destruction on 45 minutes’ notice, who needed to be deposed in the spring of 2003, rather than waiting even until fall, because of the potential urgency of the threat he represented. Your position undermines the rationale for war, and simply underscores the need to have continued the inspections that began during the 2002-03 winter and were then so abruptly discontinued in favor of war before they could completely undermine the Administration’s claims.
Like others have pointed out, pretty much any technologically semi-advanced nation can produce chemical weapons; mustard gas was a WWI technology, after all. So the notion that Saddam had the “material and…personnel infrastructure,” in manny’s abysmal phrase, to produce a WMD production program is a given. We can’t attack every somewhat hostile country with reasonably modern technology and a stable of scientists, but to do just that seems to be the implication of your and manny’s arguments.
You could have added the anthrax murderer, too. Not a bit of progress catching him at all, but that incident was certainly useful in fostering a climate of fear for a while. But five people are still dead.
The bitter-enders are, yes. But I do suspect the bulk of even the supporters of the Administration have decided to let it go, it was a colossal mistake, yes, but even Bush is human, and besides the Middle East is becoming an oasis of democracy, can’t you see it?
I tried when it was first released. I read the summary of key findings and then dug into the NBC sections. I had to stop reading with a mixed feeling of disgust and despair after the umpteenth “unverified reports…” and “unidentified sources tell us that [some other third party] may have been working on…”. For anyone with a smaller pipe than manhattan’s, here is an example. From Annex A to Chapter 5 of Volume III.
Un-named “sources” with conflicting reports as to what some third party did. And this was one of the most specific and damning sections I’ve come across! This is the timeframe immediately post Gulf-War I when the knowledge and materials were still available and fresh, before a decade of sanctions had made producing even such minor amounts of banned substances virtually impossible. The sections on the biological weapons, supposedly the easiest to do covertly because they require less in the way of specialized equipment, reads like a middle-school game of “Telephone”.
If this was not the section you were referring to, please let me know where the section it. I note that hothing here mentions that nitric acid being weaponized or the assistance of those countries being in the form of Chemical Weapons experts and equipment. In fact, nitric acid is widely used in no less than eight industries. Including such hotbeds of illicit activity as Integrated Iron and Steel Mfg, and Circuit Board Manufacture.
I disagree that the infrastructure was in a “already-strong state” based on the Duelfer report. The infrastructure has to do more than exist and be theoretically usable for illicit purposes. Most of the infrastructure was tagged and monitored by international agencies, such as IAEA or UNMOVIC. Most of the references to Saddam rewarding and encouraging development of scientists and engineers do not specify the intent behind such development nor specify which industries they were being encouraged into. The assumption, because Saddam was a bad guy, is that everything revolved around WMD, but a lot of the infrastructure improvements were in benign areas like Nitric Acid and Acetamenaphin(Tylenol). I read the reports mentions of special programs where promising college biology students were brought to Bhagdad for classes in “laboratory techniques and procedures.” No details were given as to the focus of these actual classes. Were they workshops on Biological weapons production? Doubtful, as the report section on biological weapons concludes
And that is with the easiest form of WMD to produce!
See, therein lies the quandry. The principal virtue of a democracy is that the people make the decisions. If those people are systematically decieved and a majority of them line up behind a list of justifications which are at least partially false or overstated, then how can we claim to know what the will of the people was? Backing a measure based on a false perception of it is like voting blindfolded.
I said earlier(pre-war, quoted on a previous page) that I would probably have supported action against Saddam’s regime on humanitarian grounds. I’ve got a fairly strong isolationist streak though, not because I believe in US supremacy and those ferriners are just beneath my notice, but more because I fear the horrible bungling that half or more of “nation-building” attempts turn out to be. So for me the removal of Saddam was an ends I approved of, with a means I despise. The ends do not justify the means(especially since we’re a long way from the actual end of this venture). Want to see if this democratic country should go to war for your listed causus belli? Then put those, and only those, on a declaration of war and have a vote. Some of my fellow citizens were hoodwinked into thinking Saddam was a “grave and gathering threat” when the reality is that he was contained by sanctions and inspections and too scared to even start an elementary Bio-Weapons program(the easiest to run and conceal). As far as I’m concerned this means the resolution to authorize force should be considered null and void. One of the underlying assumptions, the major one, was bullshit. There is no way in hell that it would have passed without the WMD threat being on it.
The lumps of living in a democracy mean that sometimes minorities, like those who wanted Saddam gone(for whatever reason), don’t get what they want. You wanted him gone. I wanted him gone. Lots of people wanted him gone, but we weren’t a majority, even all together. So some of those who wanted him gone bullshitted a larger bloc of people into joining the “remove Saddam” bandwagon so it would reach critical mass. Even though the wind on my face feels nice now that we’re moving, the smell of the bullshit loaded on the wagon to draw the extra passengers is making me sick.
The US sovereignty is vested in a document called the Constitution. The UN charter, with its restrictions on aggressive war, was lawfully incorporated into that supreme law of the land via the treaty process. We signed and ratified it and therefore it is our now own law that we not wage aggressive war. You’re right that there is no hierarchy and they’re not above us, but we adopted those restrictions on the use of armed force and incorporated them into our own supreme law of the land. And then violated them.
I have to apologize. When I posted last and referred to the report I was at work and had access only to the web version, so I sent you on something of a wild goose chase on that quote.
I’d recommend taking in the chapter in Volume I titled “Realizing Saddam’s Veiled WMD Intent” beginning on page 70 of that volume.
Why would you expect me to defend an intelligence gathering infrastructure that obviously had some major systematic problems?
My contention all along was that Bush acted according to the best information available to him at the time, and that claims that no weapons of mass destruction were found aren’t strictly true. Therefore, hyperbolic rhetoric about Bush’s lies seemed unfounded.
Well, to start, as one example, let’s take the title of the OP. You titled the OP “No WMD in Iraq? Guess again.” It’s not unreasonable for people to think that this is an attempt at implying that there actually were “WMD” in Iraq. It’s safe to say that these misperceptions on this issue are the result of your lack of due diligence. You should’ve chosen an OP and title mroe in line with what you’ve been “contending all along” like: “Team Bush didn’t tell lies, they told not-lies”
Perhaps you’d care to participate in this thread: Please tell me why you claim Bush lied about WMD?
It’s not even been a week since the last post. 's still very revivable. There’re a number of unrebutted issues if you’d care to give it a go.
Wow…Even though I disagree with just about every position you hold, I have always had a lot of respect for your intellectual honesty. However, This is the biggest load of horse apples I’ve come across in a long time. I am very disappointed.
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