No WMD... why didn't Saddam say so?

Great Debates
1

Its looking more and more unlikely that WMD will be found in Iraq. I always believed all those post-Gulf War I UN inspections never found anything because there was nothing to find. We’d hear all the excuses: Saddam hiding them, delaying the inspectors, etc etc.

So now Bush gives all his condemnations and ultimatums, etc. Why did Saddam allow this to happen? Why didn’t he just say “I don’t have them” or “Come in and look, you won’t find them” or even “Look, I destroyed them, they’re gone”. He could’ve saved himself a lot of trouble and kept his rule over Iraq.

2

Ummm… he sorta did say all that. And he did allow weapons instructors into Iraq. That whole Bush Administration blowing off Hans Blix deal, ya’ know?

What he didn’t do was provide evidence to the satisfaction of the Bush Administration (if that was at all possible) that these weapons, which we know he had at one point. One argument floating around the boards that actually destroying the weapons and suspending current research on WMD’s without proving any of this to the US/UN/anybody else was a rational course of action. It would have stayed off pssible military aggression from Iran, Saudi Arabia, or other less-than-friendly nations. Don’t underestimate the importance of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was doing poorly at first at faced a very real risk of losing to Iranian military power until it deployed chemical weapons. Unfortunately for Mr. Hussein, the other side of the gambit, that America would not engage in military action without actual substantial proof of WMD’s obviously didn’t plan out.

Basically, he got to keep the preventative power of WMD’s while avoiding international pressure or military action. But, again, the second part didn’t exactly work out.

Interesting theory at least.

3

Because after 12 years of posturing that he had them, everyone (Democrats included) believed that he had them. For him to turn around and say that he didn’t would have accomplished nothing and made him out to be a liar. It’s strangely ironic how things have worked out so far, if you ask me.
As far as maintaining control, I doubt it. Once the movement to war was set in motion, there was no stopping Bush. He was determined to put us into Iraq.

4

Several reasons now seem likely. First of all, it seems that part of the reason that they couldn’t document the destruction of certain weapons was that they never existed in the first place: Iraqi WMD developers in the early 80s/90s apparently exagerrated the success of their own programs in internal documents, in many cases claiming to have produced things that they hadn’t successfully produced. So there are records of things that don’t exist, and thus would be pretty hard to demonstrate had been destroyed.

Another reason, was, obviously, to hint that at the last, he’d use such weapons if attacked. That’s a pretty obvious reason for the two-faced claims of not having them… but if you attack, we’ll use them. The fact that they weren’t used is still pretty hard to understand if he did indeed have ready to go weapons. He would have lost nothing at all by using them: the very FIRST message of the war that he was given was the message that priority #1 was to simply kill him, straight out.

Of course, there’s still plenty of searching left to do. However, so far, just about every find has involved a big trumped up media claim about an important find that then much more quietly proves to be a far weaker lead than it seemed.

5

Watch it with that brush Airman, you’re getting paint where it doesn’t belong. Maybe some democrats were emotionally unstable enough to accept as fact their worst fears about Saddam’s weapons. By no means all were. To get a concensus like that, you have to look to the pubbie side of the aisle.

I’m not sure what the OP is going on about.
It’s very easy to find quotes like this one from Saddam Hussein:

Saddam Interview 02/06/03

6

Is it not astounding to anyone else that this administration has sunk so low in its lies in inuendo that it makes Saddam Hussein sound refreshingly honest by comparison?

7

He did say so. It didnt suffice because WMD were never anything more then a feeble pretext anyway.

8

As has already been mentioned he did claim to have destroyed all WMD’s.

Anyone else recall the masss of documentary evidence to support this that was produced.

This wasn’t enough though and Bush/Blair put Iraq in the impossible position of trying to prove a negative.

9

Clinton withdrew UN Inspectors aftrer seven years of searching and destroying, Bush withdrew UN Inspectors after a few short weeks . . Bush inferred links to a-Q, Bush claimed WMD . . why would anyone be interested in what Saddam had to say; as said above, WMD were always a fake pretext.

10

you silly man, that is the point. Saddam obviously lies about everything so how could we beleive him. What he should have said was “We have lots of nuclear and chemical weapons, phasers, destuctobeams and giant wombats, so don’t mess with me”
and we would have left him alone knowing he had nothing

11

Shall I bring out the quotes? Do I have to remind you that the vote authorizing the President to deal with Saddam Hussein was nearly unanimous?

The Democrats believed it too, and all the evidence bears that out. After the war was over and nothing was found, that’s when the weaseling began. But quotes don’t lie.

12

Sure, you trot out quotes from a few slimy politicians, I’ll bring pix of millions participating in anti-war demonstrations. We’ll have a party ;j

13

Could a lot of these votes have been because at the time there was huge pressure on the politicians from the admin and public to vote for this action? Post 9/11, the Admin claiming evidence of WMD, terrorist connections etc. which have nearly all faded away now but where produced as fact at the time.

14

Yes, ADalmost everyone believed Saddam had them.
Because who could possibly imagine that it was the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES that was lying and not the Eeevil Dictator.

It will be a long time before the world will ever believe an American president at face value again.

15

Well here are the relevant
[quotes]
(http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp) for you guys.

I see that Snopes has tried to confuse the issue by pointing out that many of these Democrats actually opposed the war. But whether or not one believed that Saddam had WMD is an independent issue.

What I’d like to see are some quotes from Democrats who believed that Saddam did NOT have WMD. Just a couple will suffice. But again, no general anti-war stuff. People opposed the war for a lot of reasons. What we need is a specific statement expressing skepticism that SH actually has WMD.

16

So would I.

I would especially like as much as is available on their reasons for believing that Saddam didn’t have any WMD. I hear a lot of accusations that Bush “lied” about Iraq’s having WMD. I have never seen any indication that anyone knew, or should have known, that Saddam had really destroyed them. And therefore, as far as I can tell, the worst that can be said about Bush is that he was wrong. So was practically everyone else on earth.

I have read a lot from people who opposed the war, but all of them seem to share the assumption that Iraq had WMD, and that we just needed to let the inspections continue and that would cause Saddam to destroy what he was assumed to have.

FWIW, I think Saddam destroyed his WMD sometime after the Gulf War. He didn’t want to admit it, as he wanted to

a) maintain a credible threat against invasion, either by the US or his neighbors,
b) keep the Kurds from rebelling again, and
c) not be seen as backing down to the UN.

He did hang on to his centrifuges, nuclear plans, and the mobile bio-labs, in hopes of stalling his way thru the inspections until he outlasted the will of the UN. Then the inspections end, he puts his centrifuges back online, and gets back to the task of developing his arsenal.

He was counting on the President being like Bush Sr., who was willing to drive him out of Kuwait, but not invade Baghdad and overthrow him, or Clinton, who was too busy with other things (ahem) to bother much about Iraq.

Unfortunately for Saddam, 9/11 went down, and suddenly the President of the moment was a lot more concerned with terrorism and terrorist regimes. And was not prepared to fool around indefinitely. Which is why Bush gave Saddam one chance to come completely clean, and Saddam did not.

I am sure that, sooner or later, some Democrat will claim he knew all along that Saddam didn’t have any WMD left. But it will be like Jeanne Dixon claiming that she predicted the JFK assassination - if she knew it, why can’t she produce any evidence that she said so before the fact? Same with the Snopes page of quotes - many of those cited are arguing that they are against military action in Iraq right now - but none of them are basing their opposition on an assertion that Saddam doesn’t have WMD. If they did, they would have been laughed off the public stage.

Because it is only the invasion of Iraq that let us know that (assuming we don’t find any more). Saddam was never going to admit it - if he had, he probably would not have been able to hold onto power.

Regards,
Shodan

17

I have to say that I’m a bit skeptical about this. After all, a shrewd, paranoid control-freak like Saddam doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d take the claims of his underlings at face value. If Joe Iraqi Scientist lied to Saddam and said they’ve finally perfected uberAnthrax, wouldn’t Saddam want some kind of demonstration? The idea of Saddam being lied to for years about WMD development – and never catching any of those lies – seems counter to the portrayals of the guy I’ve seen.

Yeah, I think this is why he never made a stronger denial of WMDs. He wanted to keep enough doubt and suspicion in the minds of his enemies (particularly Iraq’s neighboring countries) that he might still have teeth, and that Iran or Syria should think twice before starting a war.

18

Possibly he believed them, because he had and used WMD in the past, e.g. against the Kurds and Iraqis.

Although I agree that it was unlikely that Saddam himself was as in the dark about Iraqi WMD as everyone else.

Regards,
Shodan

19

**

How is this, alone, relevant for justifying the war? It’s not just that Bush claimed Saddam had WMD’s, it’s that he had 'em, he was buddies with Al-Qaida, and he was going to use 'em in downtown Washington next Tuesday. This was the chain of logic he used to start the war.

Of course, now we’re hearing about all sorts of hijinks that went on prior to the invasion. For instance, his neo-con lackeys set up an Office of Special Plans that pretty much was designed expressly to give the most convenient spin to any existing intelligence, and to discard anything else, and to circumvent any other agency’s access to the President.

**

As a Bush apologist, it’s fairly apparent why you choose not to pursue this notion. So let me do it for you. Unlike everyone else on earth, Bush is THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. He has the power of the United States military at his beck and call, and he has used it in a rash, pointless, manipulative manner, destroying what remained of a nation’s infrastructure at tremendous cost to the US budget. I presume you’re an American taxpayer, doesn’t this . . . irk you a little?

And do we even want to conjecture about the families of the servicemen and -women who are over there right now, and who have already died there? Should we think about the Iraqi civilians who died? I know, I know, we overthrew their dictator. So what if some of them died, they should be thankful. We had to destroy the village in order to save it.

**

The Kay Report seems to assert that these people were right, that inspections were working in that regard.

yawn Strawman, anyone? To me, this whole Iraq clusterfuck has nothing to do with Iraq. It has everything to do with an administration that had a hard-on for a third-world despot and was aching for any kind of pretext to go in after him. I’m stunned that you don’t find this entire exercise a disturbing example of an arrogant, foolish group of ideologically blindered operatives who saw an opportunity to burn American tax dollars and servicemens’ lives in a quest that they couldn’t honestly justify and which turned out to be wrong and pointless.

I’ll make more sense once I get some lunch . . .

20

Oh yeah, and that pesky bit about Iraq breaking every rule the UN could throw at them, with never a consequence. Everyone always leaves that out.

The thing is, even if all you said is true, including your opinions of our executive branch and their reasons for doing everything, I still think the world is a better place now than it was before attacking Iraq. (I don’t agree with all your opinions, but I don’t have the energy to go into details at 4:50pm on a Friday :wink: )

Regards,
PeeQueue