I’m curious: if Iraq HAD weapons of mass destruction, but has since destroyed them, why didn’t they use these weapons against the invading Americans?
Are the Iraqis just too nice and principled?
Or, did they never have the weapons in the first place?
Oh, Evil One, I know you are the world’s best expert on bioweapons, but it strikes me as odd that there are standard measures to prove the presence -even previous presence- of bioorganisms of any kind, and you still try to claim that some people won’t accept any proof. It strikes me as odd that you would take the claims of military personnel at face value without any look at the data, especially given that other microbiologists consider the concept of mobile biological weapons production facilities bogus.
But hey, we know you are the greatest expert out there, proficient in all methods of chemical and biological trace detections, so we’ll just have to take your word.
They don’t count because they were highly successful. They dismantled most of the chemical and bioweapons program, and all of the nuclear weapons program. The photo of a WMD delivery capable jet shown by Powell to the UNSC was, in fact, taken in 1991, and several such jets have been destroyed under supervision of the first inspection team.
**I’m curious: if Iraq HAD weapons of mass destruction, but has since destroyed them, why didn’t they use these weapons against the invading Americans?
Are the Iraqis just too nice and principled?
Or, did they never have the weapons in the first place?
**
They did have them. They used the against the Iranians and their own people. The question is what happened to them?
Believing they never had weapons is like believing Jimmy Hoffa never existed because no one has seen him in years.
No, he didn’t. None of the so-called intelligence provided to the inspection teams panned out. Even were something was found, such as documents, they related to already known, pre-91 programs, and in numerous other examples, there was a physical impossibility of what was claimed to be hidden at the location to be actually hidden there, such as the SCUD hangar, which turned out to be a chicken farm with a roof too low and a gate too narrow to have ever housed a SCUD.
So either they didn’t know where they were, or they deliberately lied about it, thereby being in violation of the same resolutions they accused Iraq of violating.
Apparently, we are to believe that Saddam didn’t use them because he was an irrational person, and irrational people engage in completely random behavior.:dubious:
Um, I hate to break it to you, but Blix WAS provided the information. He knew where they had been allegedly destroyed, and he was considering options to test those claims. He had also received additional material on the issue closely before the war started.
The only problem here is your blind gullibility for any anti-Iraq argument, and your not paying attention when anything to the contrary is being said. I suggest actually reading Blix’s reports, instead of just citing what you hear from the Bush administration.
Blix on March 7.
Of course, by then, you were too busy watching fancy pics of jets taking off from aircraft carriers and tanks plowing through the desert in preparation for the war to actually inform yourself on the state of inspections.
Except, of course, that the use against Iranians and their own people was before a whole bunch of them was destroyed by inspections in the 90s.
But such pesky details are irrelevant, right?
Okay, then if inspections had destroyed them, why did they say Iraq wasn’t cooperating and then leave? Why did inspectors testify that Iraq still had tons upon tons of stuff which they were getting close to until Saddam stopped cooperating?
Did Saddam kick them out, only to destroy them later?
Saddam didn’t “kick them out”. I refer you to the citation Fear Itself posted above:
The UN pulled them out before the US air strikes.
I know. Little slip-up there. Still, the rest of my argument stands.
In 1998, there were substantial quantities of chemical and biological weapons that Iraq admitted possessing. For years, the U.N. tried to get Saddam to prove that he had destroyed those inventories, but he was unable to supply such evidence. Why would Saddam destroy his weapons and then refuse to provide documentation? And what about the chemical suits that U.S. forces discovered in several abandoned Iraqi military positions, along with written instructions for the use of chemical weapons? Tony Blair says he is “still absolutely sure that weapons of mass destruction will be found.” British Defence Minister Adam Ingram, who says: “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.”
Even the Germans knew it: "“If we trust our [intelligence] services, and I do, then we know that there exist weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” said Pflueger, and referred to a November 13, 2002, BND briefing of members of parliament’s foreign affairs committee in which relevant information was disclosed. As a member of parliament, added Pflueger, he was bound by his secrecy oath not to pass on such information, but challenged Schroeder to make it public forthwith. This was necessary, he said, “so that Herr Schroeder cannot continue to spread the impression that the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a figment of George W Bush’s imagination”.
"Only two months? Isn’t that how long France asked us to allow the inspectors to continue the search? Two months seemed like a long time then, didn’t it?:rolleyes:
Wasn’t that what the French said last March?
If he had continued to have WMD’s, then of course he would have been a threat. The USSR was a threat, but they were held at bay for forty-five years.
Anti-war protesters had varying opinions as any huge group does. (Everyone seemed to agree that Saddam had had weapons at one time. Mostly what I heard the anti-war activisits saying was that we didn’t know for certain whether Saddam still had WMD or not. We didn’t trust the “proof” we were given via Colin Powell at the U.N. (Like the photograph from 1991! Aren’t you at least curious about how that photo mistakenly got in with “evidence” of Saddam’s being more recently armed?) And anti-war protesters could see the irony of our making a preemptive strike at another country for having WMD when we had WMD too!
In other words, a country armed with WMD did indeed threaten another country and then attack. But it was not Iraq that had WMD in March, 2003. And it was not Iraq that attacked.
Adaher, when the Bush administration actually produces these vast storehouses of WMD’s, then I will believe that they were there in March. So far, they have produced nothing to support their allegations that Saddam was an immediate threat.
RickJay, thanks for your open-mindedness and your willingness to consider the evidence thus far. I wish that more could be as non-defensive in their thinking.
Nope. There were substantial quantitites they admitted they had had.
a)Chemical suits aren’t proof for anything, unless you claim that the guys at the BASF across the Rhine from here are mass producers of chemical weapons.
b)Books don’t kill.
c)That the British government claims they are there is not surprising. If they aren’t, they’ll look even more like morons than they already do based on their ‘fine dossier’.
d)Even their existence would not make the war ‘right’. It would still be a violation of the UN charter.
I would hardly consider opposition members cited by third parties with a demonstrable agenda, who are quite obviously profoundly ignorant of the legal situation in Germany, and constitutional constraints, as an authority. It is funny how you always come up with editorials as ‘evidence’. The article is about as misleading as it could be, and its author is despicable in its choice of arguments which spit on the graves of countless opponents of Hitler, trivialize the holocaust, and shows gross historic ignorance. I would suggest you, and the author, both learn some basic German history before making such comments, and learn which party poses the current german government, and what it did during the Nazi era. If you want to demonstrate credibility by launching propaganda of this kind, you are seriously mistaken. All you demonstrate is gross ignorance not just on the specific issue we discuss here, but of general European history, and a gross disrespect for human life.
Not the least, the ‘authority’ cited in your article, Pflueger, neglects to mention that it was HIS party which was in power during all the deliveries mentioned. YOU, on the other hand, fail to mention they happened under US pressure. He also fails to mention that the BND advised AGAINST the war, suggesting that the consequences would be far worse than the status quo at the time.
Sorry, but you did yourself a huge disfavor quoting this article. It shows that you are willing to cite anything remotely in favor of your opinion, regardless of what a piece of trash it is.
Again…do you really expect us to find 'em this soon? It’s ironic that those who are waving their hands yellin “No WMDs!” are the same ones who said that we should give the inspectors more time. Can you say dubble standard?
No, you can’t. The inspectors were not free to move as they please, they were only a handful, and were inundated by bogus US intelligence.
But it is funny that you would call a double standard given that you expected the inspectors to work this fast even though they were working under far more adverse conditions.
Heck, the US proved incapable of securing even the stuff the inspectors had already found.
Sure. I can even spell it.
I note again, with tiresome redundance, that quarter million dollar reward offered for anyone to come forward an rat out even one of the “massive stockpiles”. There it sits, contrary to all my previous experience of human greed. Iraqis don’t like money?
The other interesting question, alluded to briefly here, is GeeDubya: dupe or co-conspirator. At this point, my money is on “dupe”.
But remember, a true dupe wants to be conned.
If you want to beat a dog, you’ll always find a stick to beat him with.
A nugget from Nick Kristoff, NY Times:
"The outrage among the intelligence professionals is so widespread that they have formed a group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that wrote to President Bush this month to protest what it called “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions.”
“While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes,” the letter said, “never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war.”"
I think he was persuaded, by a very pro-war coterie within his Administration, that war was a Good Thing, and – once persuaded – saw and believed what he needed to see and believe to justify it. If he’s a “dupe” in this sense, I don’t know that it equates with the (ad infinitum) “GWB is too dumb to tie his own shoes” threads, given how many supposedly-smart people bought into the well-planned Wolfowitz/Perle multi-front lobbying campaign.
Another factor at work was momentum. James Bowman had an article ca. early 2003 essentially arguing (I paraphrase; can’t find it right this minute) that, regardless of the soundness of the war rationale, U.S. honor was at stake once Bush laid down his (possibly unmeetable) ultimata beginning last Fall, and so the war had to go forward. I can sympathize with this, to some extent, because the law of the playground or cellblock really does apply even in int’l relations – if you call someone out, you better fight (esp. when your peer nations/rivals are motivated by such an honor code). This raises for some the question of why they ever had to call Iraq out, given the more pressing concerns of al Qaeda, the wacky Indonesians, etc.
The WMD situation has the faintly redeeming aspect (in the “hypocrisy is the tribute that virtue pays to vice”) that the Administration appeared aware at the time, and even now, that Americans would not (and Europeans certainly would not) endorse a fight for regime change, or to punish possession of some fermenters or three pints of musty old anthrax, but would support a fight to avert imminent use of lots of WMD against the U.S. and “our friends and allies.” I suppose a charitable view of the “proof” the Administration mustered to bolster up the latter point is that they knew for sure SH was an Evil Man, and engaged in what some philosopher called precursive hope that the hour would produce the WMD in some reasonably threatening-looking form (but not, one presumes, threatening enough actually to be used against the U.S. soldiers to any effect). Now that the WMD have not been used by the Evil Man, and aren’t even turning up in photogenic, if irrelevant/unusable forms, the precursive hope may be biting them a bit.
None of which means the Admin. will be necessarily effectively “called to account,” anymore than will the media who rather uncritically reported the WMD claims.