Sam, what Leaper said. Please go reread the OP – the issue is fairly narrow, and has nothing to do with the location of the ‘real’ WoMD, but with the veracity and divulgence of the information about WoMD that was said to have been known before the war had begun.
(Although you may certainly be forgiven for misunderstanding the thread intent, considering what a trainwreck has been made of it.)
Are you seriously suggesting that the amount of time taken is evidence of due process? Can we say, for instance of the sniper suspects, “This case has dragged on too long, let’s just execute the guys”?
Perhaps Rummy hasn’t been cleared for the secret proof either. :dubious:
Bravo for the thread focusing! As the Aussies say, Good at you, mutt!
Of course it pointless to debate whether or not WMD’s exist in Iraq. The more cogent question is why we believed they were there in the first place. And I, for one, pretty much did. But upon re-examination I realised that I believed it mostly because Saddam is/was an evil old bugger. Which really doesn’t prove much of anything. He may very well have gotten rid of them precisely because he is/was an evil old bugger.
Point one: WMD’s of the chemical/bio type are weapons of very limited utility. Gas is subject to the vagaries of wind, climate, etc. Bio-weapons cannot be controlled, there is no way to guarantee they won’t come and bite you in the butt. Especially if your enemy is more medically advanced than yourself.
As strategic weapons, they are worse than useless: they infuriate your enemy without limiting his capacity for counterstrike. Most especially true if your enemy is the US, simply chock-a-block with thermonuclear heavy throw-weight. One thirty megaton nuke is worth all the Sarin in the world. Because it can be aimed.
It would make perfect sense for Saddam to get rid of those “weapons” precisely because he knows no one would believe him. Hence, he has the bluff potential to keep Iran at bay and keep the US off balance, and if he finds himself in a position where he must let inspectors in, he can do it. He wins the propaganda victory of being clean, and his enemies would still not be sure!
Of course, he didn’t count on the US making up the rules as we went along. Rule One: Big Dog makes the rules. There is no Rule Two.
Clearly, the Bushistas were totally sure that Saddam had such, and totally sure we would find them toot sweet. Right now, it looks like they’re stalling for time, still convinced, even though it looks like thier “intelligence” is just so much manufactured crap. (Anybody else smell Mossad?) Keep in mind, they were pressured by the inspectors to share some of this solid gold intelligence, stalled and blustered for weeks, and then grudgingly doled some out. And the inspectors came back bitching about being sent on wild goose chases. My guess: the Bushistas were sincere, they thought they were giving the inspectors the Straight Dope, and would get back a solid 2nd resolution in return. Oooopsy!
So now their best bet is to stall, still sure they’ll be found, and when they are, say “Yeppers, thats where we thought they were, but we couldn’t say so. National security, very hush-hush. But now we can tell you, we knew it all along.”
And next time someone starts belly-aching about that “liberal” media, I want to ask howcum nobody is asking the embarassing questions: Where did this solid gold intelligence come from? Someone who maybe had a dog in this fight? And, most interestingly, how in the world did our “intelligence” agents swallow that spectacularly lame “Nigerian uranium” horseshit! How is such utter incompetence even possible!
What did the President know, and does he know it yet?
Squink, you do realize Rummy’s not saying they don’t exist, he’s saying US Soldiers will have to be led to them, as they have been moved and/or hidden.
Damn good post there, luc.
Re Bush’s veracity: He asserted something as true that he did not know to be true. That latter part is becoming more inescapable every day.
That’s called lying. Even if something shows up later, he still did not know at the time he said it. That means it’s still lying.
Now, it’s certainly possible Bush fervently, sincerely, unquestioningly believed it, on a quasi-religious basis coinciding with his absolute certainty that God picked him to be President at this moment for the purpose of whacking Saddam. Against such an article of religious faith, mundane facts and reasoning are helpless - but then it still amounts to self-delusion, which is simply lying to oneself as well as to others.
But the lie, and others associated with it, were only about a war, not a blowjob, so the usual suspects will be willing to brush it off, won’t they?
Just to ask, has the Bush Administration itself addressed this point?
Maybe not, because a newspaper article I read said that a survey found that most Americans think that whether we find WMDs or not is completely irrelevant to the rightness of the war. Hrm. If I could find that article (or better, the survey) online, I’d start a thread on it…
Here you go:
Thread away.
Oops, sorry, brain fart: I thought the poll above mentioned WoMD explicitly. Mea oopsa.
The original Gallup poll seems to be subscriber-only, but here’s a story that summarizes it.
I personally find this boggling: the justification given for the war was that U.N. resolutions, specifically regarding WoMD, were being flouted. If there are no such weapons, the war is ipso facto unjust.
FWIW, I’m not trying to say WoMD won’t be found. Who knows at this point? I’m just mystified by these hypothetical poll results that seem to show most americans would support the war even if the causus belli was (at best) utterly mistaken.
Actually, I also find it mystifying that only 25% of the war’s opponents would find the war justified if WoMD were found.
I’m an opponent, mostly out of skepticism that it was urgently necessary or that that Bush admin really knew what they were urgently screaming about, that WoMD was really in Iraq and a real threat. If the troops went in and found, say, a nuke fuel reprocessing plant or missiles loaded with nerve gas (not just precursors), I’d certainly think, “OK, maybe GW knew what he was talking about” and reconsider a bit.
I find it just as startling that 75% of the opponents would not reconsider thier stance about the war if WoMD were found, as the 90% of the proponents who think WoMD is not a needed justification.
Perhaps folks on both sides of the issue have too much emotional juice invested at this point to consider that they were wrong based on evidence/lack re WoMD.
Front page article in today’s New York Times may be of interest.
Many press reports have later turned out to have been unfounded, so I myself will wait until we have something official. However, the NYT has not generally been one of those early reporters of rumor and the article appears well researched.
At the start of the war there were those who said Israel would get attacked - didn’t happen.
The US would get struck from Basra because they passed by large cities on their way to Baghdad - wrong the UK took positions in the south.
The war is stalled outside of Baghdad because the US underestimated the power of the Iraqi army - wrong, the US forces had just out paced their supply.
Baghdad would hold off the US - Wrong.
The war in Baghdad would be a street-to-street fight - Wrong, although there is always leftover pockets of resistance.
Now its WMD, judging how the war thus far has played itself out it seems that there is compunction to jump in at every interval until a new interval appears as a better argument.
Did you even read the OP?
Those are probably the folks like me, who feel that Iraq merely having WMD is not enough of a reason to justify a war – the Administration must show that Iraq has WMDs and intended to use them against the United States.
The previous UN inspection efforts managed to find and dispose of 99% of Iraq’s WMD stockpiles. If there’s no threat to the United States, then there’s no need to rush into a war, and we could have simply allowed Hans Blix’s team to continue doing their job and enforcing the UN resolutions asgainst Iraq.
Right now the US has a huge amount of explaining to do.
US public opinion may well be on the side of the war but they are not the important ones that need convincing.
The rest of the world is watching and making up it’s collective mind, the Arab world in particular has probably decided.
What the US risks now is serious impediment to future international relations, it may lose such credibility that its view on other world affairs is marginalised.
Right now African nations, much of Europe, all of the middle East, China, Russia are more than just sceptical, and are well aware that finding evidence after the fact is not good enough.
There really needs to be a demonstration of the relevance of this classified material, they need to reveal something specific and then find the solid evidence on the ground, rather than playing coy and hoping the something will be found that might match up with an intelligence report.
In other words you put the horse before the cart, intelligence first then the materials. The US seems to be trying it out the other way so that it can pick and choose which intelligence reports to display, and hide the useless reports thus making their network seem more competant than it really is.
The US seemed very specific, but it now seems that the reason it did not pass on information to the UN inspectors is simply that they had no such information, either that or the US deliberately set up the inspectors so that their mission would be a failure and so justify a war.
Is this possible loss of credibility likely to matter to the US, well yes, because it would mean that the Franco-Russo-Sino-German view was correct, it would mean that trade agreements are likely to be less favourable to the US and vice versa, it will make a greater divide in understanding in international relations and will mean that US foreign policy will be more vigorously opposed by more and more nations.
This may well embolden other nations to hold Israel to account in Palestine and various factions in that region will be sure to use it to further their aims.This might even lead to increased levels of terrorism to produce the strongarm Israeli defence tactics that will in turn radicalise even more of the population.
The fact is that this international deception, if it turns out to be that way, will be duly noted and when the big boy cries wolf again the US will not only be isolated, it may find it has many more opponents.