The answer is no. There is not enough sarin to make them employable as WMD. We have not found WMD in Iraq. We have not found WMD in Iraq. We have not found WMD in Iraq. We have not found WMD in Iraq.
Give it up already.
How is that an overstatement? He launched a war against Iran and Kuwait and rained missiles down on Israel. He used WMD’s multiple times against international and domestic targets. He also attempted to murder a former US President. He actively tried to hide a nuclear weapons program using mobile equipment and he was less than 2 years away from being the next nuclear power. None of the “incidents” (as you put it) were random. They were directed at Israel. His successful removal represents a win/win for the region in general and the world at large.
My opinion of the 155 mm chemical shells should be clear in this thread. They appear to be holdover’s from the Iran/Iraq war. That in no way affects my opinion that SH represented an opportunity that will never again occur in the region. If you want to argue otherwise that’s fine, I’ll respect it. But don’t trivialize the nature of SH or the nature of his political/power base. He’s been trying to dominate the region and would have continued to do so.
Shodan
Merely repeating the same old bullshit over and over again will not make lies become facts.
The justification for the attack was false.
There never was a clear ongoing threat to the US or its allies, there was never a program in place to develop such a threat, and every time something has been reported as being a potential threat has turned out to be rubbish.
The US own inspection team has not found anything, and the search has been scaled down completely as there is now no expectation of finding such weapons.
However, this will not change the facts on the ground in Iraq, people will continue dying, US solders will still be killed and the region is less stable than it was.
Even if there had been a threat, the current situation is hardly satisfactory, and given that the first sites to be secured were the oilfields and not the places where so-called WMD were allegedly located, show just what the war was really about, and it also illustrates how much credibility the WMD reports had with the US commanders, becase you can be sre that if they had actually believed there was a real WMD threat, then the purported locations of these devices woud have been the very first to have been brought under control.
Why do you cling on to such obvious falsehoods, the administration clearly does not believe them, the CIA does not, just a few kooks such as yourself.
I ddn’t say he was a nice guy. But warfare is not “supporting terrorism,” it is a whole separate class of activity. He was nowhere near as close to getting nuclear capability as the adminstration has claimed (and if he possessed it, history indicates that he’d have used it as an actual war weapon, not handed it off to some group of Islamists who would have been happy to turn around and use it on him).
His removal was, generally, a good thing (if horribly executed), but even the recently posted claims of a Philipine terrorist cell connection do not support your initial claim to which I responded. The money to families of suicide bombers really was random. Not every family got money. No pattern was discerned between those who received money and those who did not. No offers were tendered that if some suicide bomber carried out a particular attack, he would reimburse the family. That is random.
Well, let’s look at this in a couple of ways:
First, let’s ask ourselves: are there conventional weapons - that is, weapons other than nuclear, bio, or chem weapons that oftentimes cause that much death and injury? If yes, then either conventional weapons are weapons of mass destruction, and the whole term is meaningless, or the sarin gas used in Tokyo was not a weapon of mass destruction.
As it turns out, the answer is yes: it’s not uncommon for a car bomb in Iraq to kill at least a dozen people, and have 66 or more total casualties (killed + injured).
Second, let’s use the Cheney 1% solution test on it.
Would a 1% chance that someone might attack us with a weapon that causes that many deaths and injuries justify going to war to prevent that risk?
I think the answer to that one is, don’t be silly. Or at least be silly in a more amusing manner.
I suppose this is possible, but common sense would suggest that if General Casey said this, he must be spiking his morning coffee. (Not that I’d blame him.)
Iran is a Shi’ite nation, and they are looking forward to a Shi’ite-dominated Iraq which would be, at worst, a junior partner in a close alliance. They don’t particularly like Sunnis.
Now there are different factions and all in Iraq, but the insurgency that we have been fighting for the past three years (ever since we were calling them “Ba’athist dead-enders,” remember that?) is a Sunni insurgency, fighting against the Shi’ite-dominated government that Iran is cozying up to.
Given all that, why on earth would Iran supply the insurgents with weapons? It would be like if we sold arms to a country at war with Britain. It makes less than no sense.
The estimate of 9-18 months was from Richard Clarke who wasn’t a Bush supporter so I took that as an unbiased estimate from as high up the food chain as I could find.
Point partially taken. While he didn’t commission the acts of terrorism, he specified the target. I would point out that randomness makes terrorism what it is. If you’re implying it was half-hearted I agree. Only his shelling of Israel had the direct input of Saddam.
That was certainly not terrorism; it was an act of war. He wanted to draw an attack from Israel, in the hopes that such an attack would shatter the coalition, which it very well might have.
I agree that it doesn’t seem logical at all. One hypothesis I’ve heard, though, is that Iran’s chief aim is to keep the pot a-boiling in Iraq, rather than allow any intersectarian compromises to be worked out. They would rather have an independent solidly Shi’a-theocratic piece of Iraq in the south than a united secular or Sunni-tolerant Iraq. So, they supply the Shi’ite militias and the Sunni insurgents, and trust to continued violence and sectarian resentment and ethnic cleansing to build their desired militant Shi’ite client state.
I’m not defending this hypothesis, but I think it might be worth considering.
Well, most of the definitions of WMD I’ve seen include their potential to kill “large numbers of people”.
I don’t think twelve really counts as a “large number” in this context. Heck, the Columbine High School shooters killed thirteen people (as well as themselves) and wounded 24 others. By this standard, the guns they used were WMD too.
I agree. I was referring to the deliberate act versus his support of terrorist.
So tossing Scuds into Saudi Arabia during Gulf War One (the USA’s biggest loss of personnel, IIRC, was when a Scud landed on a barracks) - terrorism or war?
-Joe
Or how about “Shock and Awe?”
What hairsplitting. It seems obvious to me that these relics from the Iran-Iraq war are not what Cheney, Rumsfeld, GW et al were talking about. They have been found in dribs and drabs starting in 2003.
It would be funny in a different scenario. When the subject arises of the exaggeration, obfuscation and story-switching that was the onset of the invasion people like Santorum say that is ancient history and we are beyond that now. But when he finally hears about the finding of the detrius of a past war that he can distort to defend the invasion he’s all over it.
It must be really humiliating for the last of the Bush apologists to go all the way from the threat of a mushroom cloud to Mark Twain’s “brickbats at forty paces.”
I call shenanigans - unless a cite is produced, I’ll consider both the two year timeframe and the “mobile equipment” complete fabrications. Back it up, please.
I don’t know anything about “mobile equipment” but I suspect Magiver’s “two years away from being a nuclear power” claim may stem from a pre-war claim made by Bush that a 1998 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had concluded that Iraq was 6-24 months away from having the bomb. It turned out that no such report existed. After the IAEA denied it had said any such thing, the White House said Bush had made a mistake and was referring to a 1991 IAEA report…which also turned out not to have ever existed.
Stop the presses!
On June 19, a weapons cache containing nuclear warheads was discovered by US Marines in the vicinity of Karbala.
Looks like Shodan was right. What do you lefties have to say for yourselves now?
Boy, does Shodan desperately want to be right here, or what? Virtually every post here has been a full body slam of truth against his little excited false WMD find, and still he gets up and denies clear facts.
This is beyond politics. This is religion. Faith-based politics, if you will.
This is why 30% of the people in the US still support this administration – they are keeping the faith. It’s like a psychosis – a fantasy world, where they can avoid all the hard truths and realities of their decisions.
Thousands of people, no, tens of thousands – maybe more – dead. Killed, apparently, so that people like Shodan can feel good about themselves.
It would be pathetic, if it wasn’t so outrageous and dangerous.
In an earlier post, I asked if Shodan was unscrupulous, or confused. It was a rhetorical question, but I think I didn’t give enough choices.
Once more, with feeling:
These are decades old, long-lost artillery shells, dug up from the desert near the Iraq border, where they were dumped. They at one time contained chemical weapons, but those agents are long deteriorated. No-one in the military is claiming that these are WMD’s, in fact the Pentagon is actively debunking that assumption. We probably only found them because of magnetic anomaly surveys.
While terrorists likely would be interested in active chemical weapons, these devices aren’t useful for that purpose, and are mainly valuable for their metal content, and possibly for minor explosive charges.
Senator Santorum’s announcement is a purely political ploy, designed to confuse the war issue – since polls are running so negatively against the war. This is a common political tactic, relying on unscrupulous and confused people to spread a meme.
Can we move on now, please, or Shodan, are you going to keep insisting that the earth is flat?
I say, how come I never get the interesting scam letters?! 
And as has been pointed out on any number of occasions, a thousand deaths can result from crashing a single plane into a skyscraper.