His post was accurate.
It begs to question what kind of killing power would be left with these degraded weapons, and if they would still fetch a price on the black market (had they not been found by coalition forces) and be used upon unsuspecting people in any part of the world…and then ask if they still qualify as a WMD, and how many are still out there unaccounted for.
Not nearly as accurate as mine.
Santorum is full of Santorum. From the Washington Post:
Glenn Greenwald sums up what’s going on here:
So, Shodan, are you unscrupulous or confused?
Why must it be either/or?
The “before 1991” doesn’t penetrate for me, and I’ll explain why in the next paragraph. But first let me say that these simply aren’t in a sufficient quantity to have justified the war, even for Bush, and (as you say) they aren’t exactly in tip-top shape. I think we can safely assume that if any WMDs of sufficient quantity and quality are found, Bush et al will be trumpeting it from the rooftops so loudly that we won’t be able to hear anything else.
Now, for the pre-1991 part. Although Bush did claim that Saddam was continuing to produce WMDs, an equally important part of the argument was that he hadn’t accounted for all the pre-1991 WMDs that he was supposed to have destroyed (per the terms of the cease-fire that ended Gulf War I). That was primarily what the inspections were about, btw, not about “new” WMDs. Remember, Saddam was not only supposed to destroy his WMDs (pre, post whatever), but he was supposed to do so in a way that UN inspectors could verify that they had been destroyed.
- There is no story here. From the Bush commissioned Iraq Survey Group:
So that’s the end of that. This isn’t a story. There’s no “gotcha.” These are not the WMD we were looking for. They are some degraded, useless shells from before GW1. I’m sure if you didg around enough you could probably find some ancient Babylonian arrowheads too, and they wou;d be just as relevant.
- What is the debate here? The OP is framed as a (misinformed) taunt, not a topic for debate. Is there any reason the OP posted this in GD other than to avoid receiving the appropriate response?
“Old” and “degraded” means junk. BushCo. repeatedly claimed, most notably in Powell’s presentation to the S.C., that there were active underground and mobile labs capable of and/or currently manufacturing weapons-grade chemical munitions, and those were a primary and necessary target. This pile of garbage doesn’t even come close to the over-hyped and deliberately distorted claims of threat posed by Saddam’s forces, and to claim otherwise is to grasp as the thinnest of technical straws. These shells were not the sort of things weapons inspectors were after. They were after something someone could use.
It is the perpetuation of the original lies. Santorum is using it as a last gasp, because he may well not be re-elected for his seat. Stick a fork in him, he’s done. By the way, if he indeed was flailing about with a Classified document during that interview, how did he get it, and what are the penalties for obtaining and using it in an unauthorized manner for personal political gain?
The UN inspectors were satisfied that Hussein HAD destroyed its stockpiles. Of course, it would be physically impossible for Iraq to have accounted for every last shell and prove they were all destroyed but they did as well as could have been expected and nobody actually thought that those pre-1991 weapons were a threat to the US anyway, so they were not a valid justification for an invasion. I also disagree that it was ever an equally important part of the argument. It was just one ancillary turd ball flung at the wall in hopes that the aggregate would look like a case. Everyone had already assumed for years that there were still some rotting shells leftover somewhere (something that the Republicans spun into an argument that “everyone – even Bill Clinton – thought Iraq had WMD”) but nobody before Bush ever tried to play those old, un-firable munitions off as a threat to the US or a reason to invade. This kind of thing is something that was always stipulated by everyone on all sides as probably being there. It’s not what we were looking for and not what was sold to the UN or to the American people.
I think that the roots of this shrubbery you are desparately hanging onto detached from the cliffside long ago.
Just another example of how the “war” has made us safer.
Incorrect. The UN inspectors were satisfied that they could complete the process (within a few months) of verifying the destruction of these weapons, but they had not reached the point you claim they were at. From Dr. Blix’s Mar 2003 letter to the UNSC:
If there was still a “significant” effort “underway” to complete the verification, I don’t see how you can claim that the verification was complete.
Irrelavent to the argument being made here. Simple saying “it’s pre-1991” does not in and of itself make these items of no interest. The relavent facts are the quantity and quality. If we had found the “stockpiles” of bio-weapons that Bush talked about, it wouldn’t matter if they were pre-1991 or not (if they were still useable)-- he would have been more vindicated in the eyes of the nation than he is now. (We’d still be in the current mess, but his critics would have a harder time saying the war wasn’t worth it wrt a WMD threat.)
You are correct in that the bill of goods sold to the American people was a lot more than pre-1991 stockpiles. However, it is incorrect to state that any pre-1991 weapons (in sufficient quantity) can be dismissed as not part of that bill of goods. So, if you want to argue that “degraded” weapons are of no interest, I think even Mr. Bush agrees with us there. But if you want to argue that pre-1991 = irrelavent, then you’re wrong.
My mistake on the UN’s conclusions. I thought Blix had said he was pretty sure that Iraq had destroyed its stockpiles and I seem to remember something about Hussein handing over some documentation shortly before the war.
The existence of pre-1991 weapons would have been of significance to the UN but not to the US. The US did not have any authority to unilaterally enforce sanctions, and no sanctions could have included regime change anyway. That makes the existence of ANY pre-'91 munitions relics completely irrelevant as a casus belli for the US unless it could be proven that Iraq had both the ability and the intent to use them against the US. Iraq had neither. No case at all could have been made with regards to pre-'91 stockpiles in themselves, and those stockpiles would have been superfluous to any case based on the alleged existence of current programs. They were irrelevant either way.
In any case, these particular munitions were not part of any active or usable stockpile and do not represent any vindication at all for Bush’s claims.
Now you’ve done it; from now on, whenever I read Shodan, I will see Wile E. Coyote. MEEP-MEEP!!!
I think you’re taking that argument out of context. The pre-war weapons were relevant as part of the claim that Hussein wasn’t being forthcoming about weapons he already had was continuing to make. It was proof that he’d been a mortal threat since then and continued to be one, and we couldn’t afford to wait any longer. Since it’s not true that he was hiding weapons and not true that he was continuing to make them, and wasn’t true that he was in a position to threaten the US with those weapons or ties to terrorists, I don’t see why these weapons are relevant.
Glad we cleared that up.
Considering that neither one of us thinks post-1991 weapons constitutes a legitimate causus belli, I don’t see how the legitimacy of pre-1991 weapons matters either way. So, I’m really unclear what point you’re trying to make. Bush, most of the House and most of the Senate thought WMDs in the hands of Saddam was a causus belli, and if WMDs had been found, be they pre- or post-1991, there would be a completely different political debate going on the country right now. It wouldn’t be a different debate between you and me, because niether of us wanted this war under any circumstances, but that’s not the way much of the country saw things.
I agree, and I never said othewise. Remember that I was resonding to this:
and was simply explaining why “before 1991” needn’t “penetrate”.
Since we’re not getting personal, then I’ll just note that this thread makes it obvious which Dopers are all too eager to believe whatever unsubstantiated nonsense comes out of the GOP. The question is, will those selfsame dopers be man enough to admit when they were wrong and made themselves look like unquestioning sheep?
Not naming names, of course, as that would be getting personal. 
Again, I’m not following how decaying refuse from before the first Gulf War has any relevance to BushCo’s claims of imminent threat. So what if it’s within the realm of remote possibility that huge stockpiles of munitions from that period just maybe could have been hiding somewhere? None ever was, and this crap Shodan cited has nothing to do with the WMDs we were supposed to be looking for. Why even bring anything else up? This is a garbage story about, literally, garbage, and no amount of hand-waving or equivocation possibly changes that in the slightest.
:smack: Really, this is kind of sad. Give it up already Shodan. Nothing short of “Super Secret 10,000 acre underground WMD manufacturing and storage facility found! Iraqi scientists and WMD manufacturing tech’s emerged into the sun light after this facility was found. They are reported to not know the war was over!” is going to do more than provoke either yawns or derision.
Some old pre-gulf war gas shells isn’t going to be enough to even spark interest at this point. Why should they? They weren’t what we were told was in Iraq by a long shot. We were told that there were huge stockpiles of WMD…stockpiles that could be deployed to the field or could be a direct threat to the US. Some scattered munitions buried in the desert weren’t going to be either.
And I have to agree that its a moot point in any case.
This pretty much sums up my own position at this point. Unless Saddam had WMD AND the ability to directly threaten the US there was no point in rushing to war with Iraq when and how we did it. Containment was sufficient and we already had Afghanistan on our plate. The US would be in a MUCH better position right now wrt both Iran and North Korea and dealing with both of these situations if we didn’t have a rather large percentage of our deployable military pinned down and under fire in the quagmire that has become Iraq.
YMMV of course (and probably does), but you are not likely to get any traction with this kind of ‘report’…at least not on this board.
-XT