Open your mouth
And close you eyes
And you shall receive
A great surprise.
Despite all the confident language, it looks to me as if the Administration has gotten tired, and not a little gun shy, of floating supposed proof of implications of possible nuclear-biological-chemical weapons, or Iraqi hopes to have them some day, or Iraqi plans to have them one day, or Iraqi attempts to have them some day, or having had them once upon at time, and then having the whole thing shot full of holes by various skeptics. Now the Administration has decided to just bunker up in hopes that something definitive and persuasive turns up in the future, maybe. If it doesn’t then the Administration will concentrate on telling us what a horrible, no good man Saddam was and how the chances of an orderly Middle East have been enhanced by taking Saddam out and how access to a secure oil supply has been assured. If something does turn up we will never hear the end of it.
Basicly, the Administration has decided to quit publicly digging through the horse manure insisting that there has got to be a pony in there someplace. They are not going to talk about it until somebody trots out a pony.
Right now, conjecture and speculation and wishful thinking aside, we got nothing.
[channeling a wacky conspiracy theorist]In six months we’ll be at war with Syria, or Iran, or North Korea, or somebody else and no one will care when the report comes out with lots of verbiage and very little proof. You heard it here first![/wacky conspiracy theorist]
I said that! I said that! In these very boards, I said I thought Saddam was bluffing! The Usual Suspects heaped scorn and derision upon me, 'owls of derisive laughter, Bruce, when I said that!
Told you so! Told you so! Did I mention that I told you so?
Elucidator, I think a number of your readers would greatly appreciate it if you take a moment to explain what you mean by these ‘usual suspects’ you are forever ranting about. And just what is it you suspect them of?
Cheers.
Re: the OP, my read is that there is no compelling evidence of operational Iraqi WMD and never has been, and that the six-month time frame will allow the administration to a) try to put together a plausible legend explaining away this fact; b) bury the WMD excuse for the invasion under all the other justifications advanced along with it (“war on terror”, “liberation of Iraqis/Kurds/Marsh Arabs”, etc.)
As time passes, the Masses will begin to forget the WMD claims. Without repetition of the information in the media, most people will simply assume the problems went away.
Actually, I remember very clearly in a thread that ran before the war started that you stated you believed there were WMDs in Iraq, but that was not sufficient reason for war. BTW, that is a position with which I can completely agree with. But let’s keep the record straight, OK?
The other thing to keep in mind, is that the public’s view of this war is not going to be determined by WMDs. It’s going to be determined by the situation in Iraq come election time in the US. If things are improving over there and there is an end in sight for our military presense, then I think most people will give Bush a pass on the WMD issue. If things look bad and/or are deteriorating, then the whole Iraq war issue will be a negative for him. I’m not talking about the folks who didn’t like Bush or the war. For them, it won’t matter whether or not WMDs are found anyway. I’m talking about the people in the middle who look at it and say: “Saddam was a really bad guy and the world is better off without him. If things look better in Iraq than when he was running things, the war was OK by me”.
You’re memory is ok as far as it goes, John-Boy, but later some folks were claiming “Hey, if he doesn’t have them, then he would tell us, wouldn’t he, because there would be no reason not to.” You will recall, this was offered as irrefutable proof that he simply must have had them, otherwise he wouldn’t be playing games with the inspectors.
Then I said “He could be bluffing, keep Iran off his back”.
“So whats the smartest course for an evil old bugger. Get rid of the WMD’s, but resist inspection. You can’t be truly busted, you don’t have anything to worry about. Bonus! Since no one believes you, no one is sure you don’t have warehouses full of Bad Mojo! As long as you resist inspections, knowing you can pass inspection, you keep the bluff alive at no real cost.”
I didn’t mean to imply that you hadn’t posted the “bluff” scenario, but that you did take the position, before the war the started, that Saddam most likely did have WMDs. No?
If you really don’t think so, I’ll do some searching for the quote. But I don’t remember the exact thread, just that it was back at the end of last year, or early this year.
Theres some debate over that, actually, which I am relucatant to start up again cause its kinda silly. In my own case, I mean the cadre of Tighty Righties who can be relied upon to support the Admin’s case. By now, I figured most folks knew that.
Originally, I just assumed that, of course, Hussein had banned weapons. As time goes by, my doubt grows. At this point, I feel that Hussein certainly had banned weapons programs. I mean, heck, what’s it take to be a “program”? A handful of three-ring binders and several scientsts on payroll? Surely, the Bush
Admin can find at least this.
I’ll still be at least a little surprised if we don’t find banned weapons. Less so now than before. Six-months from now, maybe I won’t be surprised at all.
But, surely, we’ll have at least evidence of some programs right?
Assuming that’s the case, then doesn’t that still justify the war? If you’re a jerkwad dictator, and you intentionally mislead the U.S. into thinking you have weapons of mass destruction, and they tell you to fess up or they’re coming over with a big stick, and you STILL intentionally make them believe that you have said weapons, then tough noogies.
The U.S. doesn’t have a crystal ball. It has intelligence reports. If those reports say there are threatening weapons, it acts on them. If that intelligence was ‘planted’ by Saddam, then I’d just say he stupidly hung himself.
But frankly, I think the weapons are there. You guys keep claiming that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but that’s just not true. Just yesterday, a bunch of fighter jets were found, buried under the sand. If Saddam could hide a squadron of fighter jets, he could hide a few containers of chemical or biological weapons.
In fact, a squadron of fully armed aircraft was found in Germany last week, buried in vaults underneath an airport. They went undetected for almost sixty years. When governments go out of their way to hide things, they can do a damned good job of it.
And sometimes in these threads it’s worthwhile to keep up with the latest news:
Seven and a half miles of documents, all needing translation. That’s a LOT of work. That batch three looks interesting - Kay’s team says that they have hard evidence of WMD being transported to Syria, and of other stuff being hidden. And they may have the info needed to find it.
If I were the Democrats, I’d be really careful about grabbing onto that long rope dangling from the White House.
Note for any jerkwad dictators reading: The way that you “intentionally mislead the US into thinking you have waepons of mass destruction” is that you clearly announce that you do not have these weapons. You then invite internationally recognised inspectors into your country in order for them to verify that you do not have these weapons. When they find weapons that they do not believe comply with your International obligations, you begin to destroy them…
That thing dangling from the White House? You sure thats a rope?
C’mon, Sam, get real here, ok? Are you going to keep a straight face when you claim that documents are bombs? Seven miles, ten miles, a hundred miles of documents dont add up to “massive stockpiles” of nuclear anthrax. They are not so much as one warhead of VX nerve gas being deployed, as Colin Powell solemnly intoned. They are not even a hypothetical nuclear weapon, whether one year, five years or a hundred years in the future.
So where is the urgent need, the absolutely certain peril, that common decency demands be the only justifiable basis for preemptive war?
To this day, $250,000 still sits on a table. All someone has to do is walk in and say “The massive stockpile is at the corner of Saddam Blvd. and Qusay Street.”
And still it sits. Why is that, Sam? Iraqi’s don’t like money? Or can you think the unthinkable, that there is nothing to sell. That we’ve been had. That we are sheep being led by jackals.
I’m even willing to believe that the Bushiviks are sincerely wrong, that they truly believe what they say. But to believe that I must believe that they formulated thier conclusion first, and walked the cat back to the premises. Yes, they truly believed that Iraq was a dire threat. But in order to believe that they had to selectively sort out the evidence. firmly ignoring anything which contradicted thier dearly held assumptions.
People died for those assumptions. Needlessly. If that isn’t misfeasance, malfeasance and sheer dumbfuckery, what is?