So come he’s been so quiet, Sam. This bloodthirsty maniac, with American airplanes bitch-slapping his radar stations if he so much as turns them on? What does Mr. Pollack have to say about that? Well, of course, he wrote a book, I won’t demand proof of that. Worked for Clinton, proof of something, ok. But suddenly Iraq experts seem to lie thick upon the ground. As to his description as a “foremost expert” well, I’ll pass.
Seems to me to be awfully reticent behavior for the Hannibal Lecter of dictators.
bloomingpouf: RACIST??? Are you kidding me? What, saying that dictators are bad is RACIST?
Is this what passes for debate on the left these days?
And just what did I say that was ‘self-serving’? I’m not exactly an arms manufacturer, y’know?
Anyway, you know you’ve got some people by the balls when all they can do is go on a cite-hunt and/or whip out the old, tired ad-hominem attacks. Racist my ass.
By the way, I want to say that London_Calling does not fit in this category. I think he’s been debating fairly, and going for substance instead of silliness. We could use a little more of that, which is why I even asked for Collounsbury to join us despite the fact that I fully expect him to lambast me with lots of insults. Beneath the cheap shots, at least the man knows what he’s talking about and debates the issues.
elucidator: My ‘cite’ for Hussein’s behaviour, other than my own study, would be Kenneth Pollock. His book “The Threatening Storm” describes Saddam in EXACTLY that way. But this is not new stuff - this is almost SOP behaviour for dictators of Saddam’s ilk. Have a read about the inner workings of Hitler’s regime, for example. It’s almost a classic pattern. Dictators who hold on to power through fear and intimidation wind up surrounded by people who are afraid to tell them the truth, and as a result they become increasingly disconnected from reality and common sense.
Oh, and Kenneth Pollock was the chief Iraq advisor to the CLINTON administration. No right-wing zealot there. But he’s one of the foremost authorities on Iraq and Hussein, and my description of how Saddam plans to use the bomb is pretty much identical to what he’s saying.
He hasn’t been quiet. Saddam has been quite active. Shortly after the gulf war he tried to assassinate Bush I. There are possible connections between him and the first WTC attack. He has, on several occasions, mobilized his army and built them up on the Kuwaiti border.
In 1998, he had recovered enough of of his WMD capability that the U.S. and Britain staged a massive bombing attack to destroy it again.
In fact, he had been so active that the Clinton Administration decided that containment wasn’t going to work, and switched its official policy to regime change.
Since 1998, he has been on a crash rebuilding program. He has rebuilt much of his major nuclear facility destroyed in the Gulf war. He has spent over 1 billion dollars inside his palaces, on god knows what.
He is funding suicide bombings by Palestinians.
The only reason he hasn’t done more than that is because his economic power has been diminished by the sanctions, and because the U.S. and Britain maintain the no-fly zones and routinely bomb anything that lights up their threat detection systems.
But now, the sanctions are crumbling, Saddam is gaining more resources rapidly, and intelligence suggests that he is engaging in a crash program to get a nuclear bomb.
Does that sound like someone who is staying at home quietly knitting?
April Glaspy, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, apparently said some noncommittal things that Saddam took as some kind of signal that the U.S. would stay away. Glaspy claims that she was misunderstood. I believe the context was that Saddam accused Kuwait of slant drilling, and Glaspy said, “We are not concerned about that”, which Saddam chose to read as the U.S. saying it would not interfere if he invaded.
This case is, in fact, just another example of how dictators like Saddam can convince themselves that they can do incredibly dangerous things and get away with it.
Oh, quite sure. Iran unilaterally abrogaded their nonagression pact with Iran and attacked in 1980. To be sure, there were border skirmishes before then over some disputed terroritories.
Here’s an ironic twist for you: Saddam’s justification was that Tariq Aziz was almost assassinated, apparently by Islamic radicals. Saddam had the head of the Islamic radical group executed, and then launched an attack.
The real reason was that Saddam saw the Iranian revolution as an opportunity. Until then, the Shah was under the protection of the United States, and in any event Iran was much, much stronger than Iraq. But the Islamic revolution in Iran decimated the military, because the Ayatollahs rounded up all the officers including pilots and mechanics and had them shot. So the military power of Iran rapidly fell into disrepair, and Iran had no friends left (the U.S. was an enemy, and the Soviets were keeping their distance). So Saddam thought that he had an historic opportunity to expand his empire. He was wrong. Iran is much bigger than Iraq and has much bigger resources. Once the war started and Iran got serious about its military again, Saddam was in big trouble.
Rather than call a truce, Saddam fought for 8 years, and resorted to using chemical weapons against Iran’s soldiers, even when it became clear to everyone else that he had no chance of winning.
Ever hear of MAD? Saddam’s gamble is that the U.S. would not sacrifice a city for, say, Kuwait. So Saddam threatens to use a nuke unless the U.S. leaves him alone. Or he just goes ahead and invades Kuwait again, and then threatens a nuke attack if the U.S. retaliates.
This strategy would be a lot more effective if he had 2 or more nukes instead of one. Because then he can do something like drop a nuke on Tel Aviv to shock the world, while holding another in reserve to maintain a retaliatory threat.
Do I think that would work? Not a chance. If Saddam nuked us or our allies, we’d destroy him in a second. But it doesn’t matter what I think - what matters is what Saddam thinks.
Your confusion about ‘enriched’ vs ‘non-enriched’ vs ‘weapons-grade’ uranium is understandable. Here’s the straight dope:
Uranium ore is mostly U-238. The U-238 isotope is radioactive, but it isn’t really fissionable. Natural uranium also contains small amounts of the U-235 isotope, and it’s this that is the dangerous stuff.
To use uranium in a reactor or a bomb, it needs to be ‘enriched’, which means the percentage of U-235 has to be increased. For a nuclear reactor, the Uranium has to contain anywhere from 3% to 50% U-235. Bombs are typically made from Uranium enriched between 50 and 90%.
So, ‘enriched’ uranium is any uranium that has been processed to increase the proportion of U-235 by weight. Whether it is ‘weapons grade’ or not depends on the degree of enrichment, and perhaps on the removal of impurities and such.
U-235 is the really dangerous stuff. ‘Depleted’ Uranium is Uranium that has had all of the U-235 removed from it, and it’s considered so safe that it can be handled as ammunition in guns.
Most of the uranium that has been intercepted is not highly enriched. Some of the stuff found has been natural ore, some of it ‘enriched’ to maybe the 3-5% for reactor use. And given that this is the black market, some of the recovered material was apparenty a ‘scam’, in the sense that the black marketers have tried to sell Osmium or depleted Uranium with the claim that it was the real stuff.
But a disturbing amount of the recovered stuff is enriched. Have a look at this list, again, just of interdictions in Turkey. There’s an awful lot of enriched uranium on it, including a bust of 6kg - almost half the material required for a bomb. Another bust was for almost a kilo of ‘weapons-grade’ uranium.
And don’t forget - even if the stuff isn’t weapons-grade, it would still make a hell of a mess in a ‘dirty bomb’.
Imagine what kind of speculative dossier you could put together on North Korea/China/Iran?! The mind boggles in anticipation. After reading it, I’m sure we’d all be willing to blow them to pieces as well.
OTOH, methinks they could come fabricate a pretty good case as well. You know, what’s good for the goose…
Hmmm…maybe détente isn’t such a bad idea after all.
Another non-argument. How about debating the issue? Here, let me show you how it works:
Here’s the problem with invading Iraq. First of all, Saddam learned from the Gulf War. He’s not going to send his army out into the desert to be slaughtered. He’s going to pull them into the cities and force the U.S. to dig them out. Saddam can’t win a military war, but he can ‘win’ if he turns public opinion against the war, or at least causes the U.S. to take so much diplomatic damage that its standing in the Middle East will be severely diminished.
And that’s a realistic danger. Saddam is ruthless enough to intentionally put civilians into the line of fire in order to enrage world opinion against the Americans.
In the meantime, if the U.S. doesn’t manage to crack command-and-control immediately, Saddam launches biological weapons at Israel and chemical weapons at Americans, thereby bringing about the result we were trying to prevent in the first place.
America finally topples Saddam, but then what? They install an American-friendly regime, and the population hates it. There are riots. An assassination or two. Uprisings. The U.S. finds itself controlling a hostile population. World opinion reaches new lows. In the meantime, the Kurds break off, which destabilizes Turkey, and the U.S. loses a very critical ally.
Israel responds to a biological attack by retaliating against Iraqi cities (probably not with nukes, but possibly a bombing campaign). This enrages the Arab world. In the meantime, Israel manages to inoculate its citizens, but the blowback of the virus into the poorer Arab world starts to take a heavy toll. The Middle East is a mess. Terrorism increases. Whatever enriched Uranium Hussein had is now missing. And hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Iraqis and other Arabs, are dead.
There. Those are the arguments. These are serious issues, and the stakes are as high as they can possibly be. It deserves a serious, thoughtful debate. Not name calling and attempts to play cite-gotcha or throwing sarcasm around.
Ummm, Sam, the topic is “Uranium siezed in Turkey - made in Germany?”
The topic is not “How dangerous is Saddam?”, or <pounding fist, turning blue>“Why won’t you LISTEN when I say how dangerous Saddam is!” or even “Things Sam says about what happened in 1991 and 1998 that aren’t really true.”
Really, I have no problem at all with agreeing with you that Saddam is dangerous, or even that He Must Be Dealt with.
My quibble – a huge one – is the U.S. working unilaterally v. under U.N. auspices. If the current hysteria is a means toward the latter, fine. If not, it’s a terrible approach IMHO. (I also have major issues with political motivations on the part of the players, but we won’t go there.)
So, wow! we’re in agreement on the big points! Mostly.
A big problem I have with some of your arguments is that some of them are only peripherally true at best.
Exhibit A is “the Clinton Administration…switched its official policy to regime change.” This is at best heavy spin – Clinton signed the “Iraq Liberation Act” that was pushed by the legislative branch, not asked for by the executive, and he probably did so to distract from the impeachment hearings. And the “regime change” discussed at that time was about funding Iraqi dissidents, not invasion by U.S. troops, despite your hawkish quotes about the use of “force”, which obviously means “bombing” in the context of the quotes. This is not conclusive evidence at all that Saddam was suddenly more dangerous, but you’ve cited it again and again as ‘proof’ about how dangerous Saddam was in 1998.
Exhibit B: “In 1998, he had recovered enough of his WMD capability that the U.S. and Britain staged a massive bombing attack to destroy it again.” Nonsense. Utter tripe. The bombing in 1998 was in retaliation for the departure of the weapons inspectors. It was not in response to any indication whatsoever that Saddam had gained WMD capability, but was done as punishment for Iraq abrogating UN agreements.
Exhibit C: Iraq is RIGHT NOW 6 months from building The Bomb. Come now, this has been exploded and questioned in enough reasonable ways that it’s not worth citing at this point. It’s a questionable assertion at best. Iraq is dangerous enough, whether or not this is true, so why keep tossing out this obvious canard?
Sam: I’m sure you’re doing this out of passion for the issue, but weak cites such as these are detracting from your point and giving easy ammunition to whomever you think you are trying to convince about the issue.
You forgot to condemn wild speculation based on sketchy evidence. For the second time you are treading over into tinfoil hat territory in order to justify your worldview. When 99% of the uranium evaporated, so did the credibility of your threat assessment. Why should we place any weight on your current speculative masterwork, when you won’t even admit that you were wrong to accept the uranium smuggling story at face value ?
What situation was that again? What other factoids have you accepted as true in such an uncritical fashion? This is not a rhetorical question. Could you list the top ten or fifteen for us please? If we just throw away all that speculative crap before beginning, it would make it easier for us to have that much needed, thoughtful, serious debate about the issues.
What are you talking about? I disagreed with the notion that this was some U.S. conspiracy. I made no comment at all on the quality of the reporting. However, this incident is only one of very many. Follow one of the cites and read it.
Saddam probably doesn’t have enough fissile material to make a bomb yet. He almost certainly has *some fissile material. Too much is floating around his neighborhood to believe that he hasn’t gotten his hands on some of it.
But the *possibility exists that he already has enough material for a bomb, no matter how unlikely. That alone is worrying enough. And if he doesn’t have one today, we really have no idea how long it will take him to buy enough material. I will agree that it looks like he’s at least 2-5 years away from being able to manufacture his own.
As for the ‘speculative’ charge, I have provided cites for every bloody thing I said.
And you know, it’s about time that you guys who oppose Bush offer up your alternative vision. It’s easy enough to sit on the sidelines and snipe at every decision Bush makes, but what’s your serious alternative? What are you looking for? More inspections with conditions? One more shot at inspections, with War if Saddam starts playing games again? Just leaving him alone, dropping the sanctions, and getting on with our lives?
Let’s hear it. You tell us what the ‘proper’ course of action is against Iraq, and we can debate it.
Hang on. If I missed a question you had, please repeat it. I thought I was covering anything, but I guess not. I seem to be the only one responding to about five people, so I may have missed something.
As for your solution, I think that’s eminently reasonable. But still a little vague. So let me see if I can clarify it.
To get your support, Bush should:
[ul]
[li]get a new U.N. resolution that demands that Iraq allow complete, unfettered inspections, of all areas including the presidential palaces.[/li][li]Said resolution should spell out that if the Iraqis interfere with inspections the U.S. can find him in material breech and begin ‘kicking his ass’.[/li][li]Begin inspections, and if Saddam starts refusing entry into certain sites respond by either inspecting by force, bombing the site, or beginning a regime change war.[/li][li]Rebuild the country.[/li][/ul]
All the steps have issues, I wouldn’t argue otherwise.
Some steps be can said to have been done before, but we’re debating what to do now, not what should have been done previously.
And at the end of the process you have either a) a compliant Iraq (and, yes, I’m not holding my breath), or b) a ‘regime change’ done by the numbers (and a heckuva mess to clean up, but unavoidable).
The key thing for me, and I think others, is UN auspices for action. This was how the force against Iraq happened in 1991, and there’s no reason it can’t be done again.
Bush has laid out a clear case about Iraq abrogating UN resolutions, but this does not give the U.S. carte blanche to act unilaterally. The UN must respond. It is entirely appropriate that the US prod the UN to do so, but the eventual response must be done under the cloak of international legitimacy.
The UN will probably not authorize ‘regime change’ without a clear provocation, so we have to go the inspections route one more time (yes, I know), but with the difference that this time the penalties (and therefore authorization for eventual U.S. action) are clearly spelled out in the new resolution. The U.S. should push the UN for this specific clause in any new resolution, and accept nothing less.
Regarding the OP: maybe no youranuom (sic) was involved!
Looking at the photos of the canister we see this curious lettering:
Made in West Germany . . . . . Primarily Youranuom (sic)
My BS sense is tingling! Besides being in English, can we imagine a nuclear organization using such peculiar spelling? Was Dubya playing with the stencils?
There is that, the other item is that Turkey released those “terrorists” for lack of evidence! http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/09/29/turkey.uranium/index.html
As the article mentions, more likely than not, we have here a case of swindlers that were on their way to get a big loot from (what they expected) gullible Middle East clients.
We should not ignore the possibility that other rogue nations could have been the clients of these “swindlers”, not just Iraq. But the evidence that is dripping out (quite conveniently to the administration) shows that there was no rogue nation involved in this case, this affair looks like the result of a sting. IMO Turkish authorities are covering their butts.
Resign in favor of the legitimate President. But I’d also be mighty grateful if he could just control himself long enough not start WW-III.
But yeah, basically, no unilateral “pre-emptive” blow-them-to-bits strikes. Dangerous precedent my friend, unlikely to solve anything – in fact, quite the contrary.
Now, THAT is strange. They let these guys go because there was only 5 ounces of Uranium? Very weird. I would think the law would prevent the trafficking of ANY Uranium.
Gigo, I think you may be right. The bust will turn out to be osmium or depleted uranium, and the cops busted a scam.
squeegee: It turns out that our positions are very close. This is the way I’d characterize mine:
[ul]
[li]It would be a huge advantage to move on Iraq with UN support. Therefore, as long as there is no imminent threat (read: weeks or months) of Saddam using a WMD, then all possible steps should be taken to gain U.N. approval.[/li][li]However, great care has to be taken to prevent this from turning into another UN circus that drags on for months and ends up with some toothless compromise resolution that is worse than useless.[/li][li]To that end, the Bush administration should bust its ass and exhaust every possible diplomatic channel, but with the clear requirement that the ultimate goal is the disarmament of Iraq. That means inspections without conditions, including access to all presidential areas. It also means ‘spot’ inspections, not those sham inspections where the inspectors tell Iraq that they plan on inspecting Area X a week from tomorrow, giving them plenty of time to hide or move incriminating information or equipment.[/li][li]The resolution must have strict wording allowing the U.S. to attack Saddam if he is found to be in material breach of the agreement. What it can’t do is have some nebulous wording that takes the whole issue back to the UN again if Iraq is in non-compliance, because if that’s the case it’ll give Saddam the ‘out’ he’s looking for to continue jerking around the inspectors while he buys time, and it would repeat the cycle that led to the first breakdown of inspections in 1998.[/li][/ul]
That’s the resolution Bush should expend every ounce of political capital trying to get.
Now, here’s the next question: What should the U.S. do if the U.N. won’t go along with that? In that case, what would you suggest as a fallback plan?
I suspect that’s where we’ll differ. I’m convinced that the proper approach right now to create the highest chance of getting that resolution is make it unquestionably clear to the U.N. that the resolution the U.S. wants is the ONLY way to avoid war. Call it gunboat diplomacy, but the U.N. must not be allowed to think that it can sweep this issue under the rug. If it’s given a fait accompli, I think it will ultimately vote for the resolution in order to maintain its legitimacy. And I think this is exactly Bush’s strategy right now. He’s beating the war drums precisely to force the resolution he wants. It’s a good strategy, but it’s not 100% guaranteed to work.
If it doesn’t, then the U.S. has to follow through on its threat, both because it’s the right thing to do but also because failure to do so after taking this uncompromising stance would damage the U.S.'s credibility and just embolden Saddam more.
Secondly, I was hoping for a more detailed response to the remainder of my post. Regarding this:
*Sam, as I pointed out in my last post, none of the ”busts” listed here have been confirmed, according to CNS – the very website that produced the list. This is the second time in this thread that you’ve presented this list as fact, and the third time I’ve pointed out that it is based on unsupported source reports of the type that started this thread in the first place. So what you have here, really, are 18 busts – only 5 of which involved enriched uranium or plutonium, allegedly – stretching back over the course of six years, none of which have been confirmed.
Let’s take an example. We learn from the footnotes attached to the CNS list that the reported 1993 interdiction of 6kgs of “enriched uranium,” which you find particularly worrisome, is derived from an article in Scientific American entitled, “The Real Threat of Nuclear Smuggling .” Easy enough. Locating the actual source, we read:
**Thus, in reality, we don’t know if the 6kgs actually was enriched or not; in fact, we don’t even know if the incident occurred at all.
In addition, the 6kg bust contradicts other sources, including ones you’ve also used, such as the IAEA. There, in the press release I linked above, the IAEA officially states that thus far, all confirmed interceptions of enriched/weapons grade material have been in very small quantities, not large enough to use for building a bomb. Unfortunately, the release doesn’t provide any details concerning the 18 interceptions, so we don’t know how much material really was involved. (I’ll nose around on the site, though, and see if I can locate any more info).
We also don’t know how many, if any, of these interceptions were in any way related to Iraq. The mere existence of a quantity of radioactive material floating around doesn’t mean that Iraq has bought any. Your evidence is merely circumstantial. In fact, the most likely purchaser for WG material seems to be Iran, rather than Iraq; apparently, although the Iranians have much of the necessary technology to build a bomb, they haven’t figured out how to enrich uranium yet. Iran is also a known “terrorist state,” supports Hizbollah, violates human rights, hates American, etc. In other words, your argument is as applicable to the support of a unilateral strike against Iran as it to one against Iraq.
I’m not trying to downplay the very real seriousness of these problems, by the way; I’m just trying to put them into proper perspective. Plutonium and uranium smuggling is going to be a problem for a long time; bombing Iraq isn’t going to end the smuggling.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play booji-boo with my 4-month-old son for a few minutes.
Sam; you’ve made valiant effort to defend your position even when the story crumbled as I have predicted. But could you at least admit the following:
you (and december) went off on a tangent as soon as this story was reported, without waiting for further verification, while it did not support your conclusions at all. There may or may not be other uranium necessary for weapons production circulating, but this was not the proof as you posited at the beginning.
most of the general public will have imprinted in their minds that there is concrete proof that “weapons-grade uranium in large quantity” is transiting in Turkey toward Iraq (even after the media issue page 3 corrections to the original story…). After all, we are talking about a public gullible enough to believe on average 90% of what is on www.snopes2.com and that do not even have your or my superficial understanding of the difference between natural uranium, weapons-grade uranium and the quantities required to make a nuclear bomb…
I don’t want you to necessarily believe it, but at least admit that the US government and/or US intelligence services have the means, the opportunities and the motive to fabricate or at least use such a story. Perhaps as simple as the CIA knewing of scammers going around with fake uranium stocks and tipping the police with a lie on a “15kg weapons-grade uranium shipment” knowing full well what would come down the news wire after the arrest… How the heck otherwise did the Turks assume that it was such a precise quantity of such a rare substance? Anyway, just admit the possibility…
