Why do that? Why not use them on the advancing American forces? These are weapons of last resort–when the enemy is bearing down on your capital, that’s the time to use them. You can bet your bippy that if the Canadians were bearing down on D.C., we’d nuke their asses. There were plenty of opportunities to do so.
Well I’ll make 2 assumptions here. First is that the US would have taken into consideration (least I hope) that SH would try to dump any stuff before the war starts. Next, I would imagine that all available surveillance was tuned into Iraq in the days leading to the war, and they because of the first assumption, they would be on the lookout for such activity.
In regards to the well, I just feel there should be something, anything. If the things were disassembled then hidden, perhaps there is evidence of disassembly. I realize we are looking for a needle in a haystack here, but remember we already knew they had the stuff :rolleyes:, we just needed to keep tabs on it.
I really hope they find something, at least to offer a modicum of credibility to this situation, but since they are accusing Syria of hiding WMD, and floating new terms like “Nuclear Mujahedden” into everyday lexicon, me thinks we won’t be finding anything soon.
Maybe to make coalition forces look bad. Maybe he’d gotten rid of them by then. IMO, the least likely scenario is that he never had WMD. Possible, but not bloody likely. If they did exist at one time, I have no idea where they could be now or even if they could be found. Like World Eater, I hope some are found eventually and preferably sooner instead of later.
If SH had the stockpiles that we said that he did prior to this war, he would not have been able to destroy them at the last minute. You cannot just dump the stuff out on the ground or burn it with out contaminating the area that you are in this would be easy to find. I think that this is all about the oil. What is the first thing that we secured when we arrived? The oil fields. What is the one thing that we protected from looters? The oil fields.
My $.02
OK, this cracked me up. Saddam must truly be an evil genius if he can conceive of a scheme in which he discredits those who called him a deadly madman with his twin strategies of Not Having Weapons of Mass Destruction and Not Hurting Anybody.
Diabolical.
Well the oilfields were secured because having them spewing flames hundreds of feet into the air does nobody any good.
One thing about biological and chemical weapons that has seen little air time is the fact that you can’t really stockpile them. Rolf Ekeus, the former head of UNSCOM, stated that most BC weapons are no longer weapons grade after as little as a year in storage. This also means that they can’t be properly identified after that time.
This means that even if Saddam had huge stockpiles of BC weapons, there’s not gonna be much left to find anymore. What Saddam may have wanted was the ability to produce such weapons at short notice, and such installations can be very hard to distinguish from civilian use installations.
No real point other than the fact that WMD stockpiles is a slightly weird concept.
No it doesn’t do anyone any good at all to have the oil fields on fire but the things that we choose to (and not to) protect show the things that are our priorities.
Securing them could have been a priority for several different reasons, not all of them being nefarious.
Occam’s razor, anyone?
No, doggamnit!!
When it comes to National Security we must needlessly multiply them entities!!
I thought that was confiscated by the new airport screeners…
Glad I could amuse you. 
This kind of statement always puzzles me. Could someone please point me to an example of Saddam’s noncooperation with the last round of UN inspections (i.e., the ones immediately preceeding the war)?
The inspectors were allowed to go wherever they wanted to go. They weren’t kept waiting at the gates of any compound (other than one instance in which, IIRC, nobody could find the keys). If Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, he couldn’t have led the inspectors to them, obviously. If he didn’t have them, how could he have provided evidence of their destruction?
So how did he “not cooperate” with the inspections?
Early Out, I do seem to recall statements from Blix indicating that Saddam was sort of cooperating, but not fully cooperating with the new inspections. In my book, cooperation is like pregnancy, either you are, or you’re not, and ‘sort of’ counts as not.
I would agree that it sure seemed like most of us arguing here against the war figured Saddam likely had bio and chem weapons. (I was openly dubious then that these constituted “weapons of mass destruction,” and I’m still doubtful on that score, but that’s another story.) I was certainly just as surprised as anybody when they kept on not turning up.
How about not allowing U2 fly overs? How about not letting the inspectors use helicopters so they could get to sites faster?
You want picture perfect cooperation, look at South Africa, look at Ukraine.
SH would drag his feet and do the bare minimum required of him.
He didn’t stick a gun in his mouth and blew his brains out on national television, as George W. Bush would have wanted. :rolleyes:
And even if he had done that, I’m sure George would have found something else to harp on about how it was “not good enought,” and that Saddm was still not in “full compliance.”
On the other hand, if this were Bizarro World, and the UN were calling for the U.S. to allow weapons inspectors access to everything in our country, I’m sure we’d comply no problemo.
:rolleyes:
Maybe you should try living in reality and cease postulating how things would play out in alternate universes.
I think wondering why he wasn’t more cooperative now that it looks like he had no wmd, is a valid question btw.