Milum
The question is not so much who planted the latest bomb, but that you use it as evidence for Saddam sponsoring terrorism against the west which justifies the war. Where is the timeline? This bomb exploded month after the invasion…
Cet animal est très mechant,
Quand on l’attaque il se défend.
(La Ménagerie, Theodore P.K.)
(This animal is very wicked, when attacked it will defend itself.)
De quel animal dites vous? L’Amerique ou L’Irak?
T. Mehr
Milum
The question is not so much who planted the latest bomb, but that you use it as evidence for Saddam sponsoring terrorism against the west which justifies the war. Where is the timeline? This bomb exploded months after the invasion.
Why is not the question not so much who planted the last bomb?
Did many of you all sleep through the first gulf war? Hunker down, wait til the allies grow tired through attrition,… and then explode. was Saddam’s entire strategy. Gee, am I the only person who reads on this board? Whole books have been written demonstrating Saddam’s support of terrorists of all kind. Spare me a trip to the library and listen…
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At the onset of Gulf War II hundreds of foreigners were intercepted by the allies as they entered Iraq to conduct jihad against the “foreign devils”. Many hundred others were not caught.
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A few billion dollars worth of deep tunnels were constructed beneath Baghdad by Saddam. To build a secret subway for the people was not his intent.
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The entire Iraqi Air Force was found buried ten feet beneath burning desert sands a hundred or so miles from Baghdad. This was obviously accidental. Saddam has said repeatively that he doesn’t hide weapons. Maybe they just sank.
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The horrendous suicide bombing of the headquarters of the U.N. was the work of… (pick one)
____(a) Terrorists spreading terror.
____(b) Iraqi freedom fighters who hate the U.N.
____© The americans who don’t like the U.N.
- Who bombed the Shiites Shrine two days later killing more than a hundred and wounding two hundred more…
____(a) Iraqi muslims who hate Shiites.
____(b) American soilders who hate Shiites.
____© Two Saudi terrorist and two Iraqis terrorists in an attempt to bring anarchy to Iraq.
- Who blew up the Iraqi oil pipeline to Turkey? Who blew up and still blows up the water mains that bring fresh water to a thirsty iraqi people… etc, and so forth, etc. and ad nauseam
So I take all that bluster to mean that you don’t have a cite for Hussein being behind this?
This is just your own personal, wild-eyed, arm-waving theory?
That’s what I thought.
Actually Al Qaeda has claimed repsonsibility for 9/11 (including Bin Laden on videotape bragging about it,) The US Cole Bombing, The Bali Bombing, the Un building in Iraq bombing, various Iraqi bombings and probably Bob Hope’s death and the spread of reality TV.
The most cursory of web searches belies your words:
You’re missing the point of the thread, Scylla. Wonder why?
[ French linguist snob mode ON]
Sailor, this is a ridiculously small nitpick but, since you painstakingly took the time to add in the correct accents, you forgot to add the accent aigu to méchant.
Oh, and Elvis? The correct verb in your sentence would be “parlez”, not “dites” .
C’est tout!
[French linguist snob mode OFF]
I humbly accept your correction.
Isn’t “French linguist snob” a redundancy, in several permutations?
Nope. Just fighting your ignorance.
We’ve already found an example of a longer range Al Samoud (i think thats the name) missle. However, remember that their older missles could still hit around Israel. That isn’t the big threat though- their missles were still inaccurate as hell. Don’t forget they launched missles at Kuwait before our invasion but most were wildly off target.
The missles are a violation of the sanctions, but still, no WMD. There was also no evidence they’d use them for anything except to defend themselves.
Well, this would be the Saddam mindset to support this:
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My chemical weapons aren’t going to do squat to hardened American targets. But the threat of them has already caused them to work in MOPP gear and take expensive and progress-slowing countermeasures. That’s the best you can hope for against well-equipped troops.
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The only chance I have of surviving the U.S. attack is not to beat them on the battlefield, but to go underground and fight them in a guerrilla war, and break the will of the American people, who history has shown have short attention spans and crack easily under pressure (ref. Mogadishu, Vietnam, Beirut).
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Part of this requires discrediting the United States in front of the world. Therefore, I need to get rid of my WMD, or hide them very well. Because if they come in and don’t find any, they won’t get any support from the world.
That gets us to where we are today - the WMD are missing, Saddam is nowhere to be found, and there are ongoing attacks of increasing sophistication and deadliness. The attacks are very carefully being aimed at sowing chaos - hit the U.N. to split world opinion further. Sabotage the infrastructure to rile up the population. Bomb a mosque to rile the Shia and turn them against Sunnis. Start a civil war. Discredit the United States. Make reconstruction a failure.
There. A plausible scenario to explain everything to date. And a rather likely one, in my opinion. If you were Saddam, what else would you do? He wasn’t stupid enough to think he could beat the U.S. toe-to-toe. Given that, what other options did he have?
If this scenario is correct, then there is still grave danger, because Saddam may still have WMD. He just won’t use them until he has no other options left. It may be a hail-mary if his other plans fail. What would a massive chemical attack on Najaf do to the reconstruction? What if a cylinder of Vx gets opened in a crowded Mosque with 5,000 people inside?
The massive influx of terrorists into the country makes this more likely, because it gives plausible deniability that the WMD came from the Iraqi ex-government.
Now, this isn’t the only possible scenario for what’s going on. And much of it is speculation. But it is logical, it makes sense, and it fits all the known facts. I predicted as much before the war - I said the biggest risk was that Saddam would go underground and wage a guerrilla war (or dig in in baghdad and try a Stalingrad option). I honestly think that’s exactly what’s going on. What we’re seeing now is the regime’s war plan, formulated before the invasion.
And if the regime is still there, they may still have their WMD.
One big problem with your scenario is that if it is true, the war has failed disastrously in its aim of “disarming” his regime. If in fact he has hidden the weapons or moved them out of the country he (or whatever is left of his regime) still has the weapons and can still pass them to terrorists. And now that he doesn’t present an open target for the US to retaliate against he has much less to fear in doing this.
This was exactly what I had warned about for months before the war; that the US would be unable to find the weapons , if they existed, and the war would increase the chances of the weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. At that time you said that the US knew where the weapons were and/or that Iraqi scientists would run over and tell the US where they were kept. Obviously you were completely wrong.
So either the weapons don’t exist or the US has completely failed in its objective of disarming Iraq and the war has increased the chances of the weapons falling into terrorists hands. Either way the war was a failure.
Touché !!!
That may in fact be the case.
Yes, I may have been wrong about that. But I always acknowledged the risks of any action. I specifically warned that this scenario was a risk. Anyone who believes they could be absolutely right about every possible outcome is fooling himself. And while I know you want to portray yourself as an Oracle of wisdom, you were quite wrong about many things as well. And that’s okay - no one was right about everything. And you employed the ‘shotgun’ approach - claim that a million things will go wrong, so that if any of them come to pass, you can claim that you were right.
Let’s go down the litany of bad things the left said was going to happen:
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Kurdish Uprising/Interference by Turkey - nope. The Kurdish areas seem remarkably stable.
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Massive humanitarian crisis, starvation, etc. Nope. The goalposts have been moved significantly. Where once we were told of millions of people starving, now the goalpost for failure is the fact that the lights aren’t on 24/7 across the country.
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Environmental disaster - the oil fields were supposed to be in ruin, burning in a conflagration greater than Kuwait ever saw. This was going to blacken the land, starve the people, and require a massive effort to stop. Never happened. Saddam was going to blow his dams, and kill hundreds of thousands and flood the lowlands. Never happened. In fact, the war turned out to have massive environmental benefits, as the army corps of engineers is now looking at re-flooding the drained marshes.
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The ‘Stalingrad’ scenario. Baghdad was supposed to take months to fall. The whole city was a fortress, and the U.S. was going to lose tens of thousands of men trying to take it, and there would be massive civilian casualties. As we now know, Baghdad fell with almost no casualties, in record time.
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The rise of the ‘Arab Street’. The invasion was supposed to cause mass protests in the Arab world. I haven’t seen any. In fact, the war seems to have been a catalyst to increasing reform pressure in Syria, it seems to have helped the peace process in Israel (now scuttled again - sigh), and the rest of the Arab world seems remarkably quiet.
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The war plan is all wrong, and the Americans are going to get slaughtered. Remember this one? After the U.S. suffered a temporary slowdown on the way to Baghdad, and there were some attacks on the supply lines, suddenly there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s a trap! The U.S. flank is dangerously exposed! Heads need to roll. Which generals are responsibly for this horrible outcome? It’s Rumsfeld’s fault! He’s the one that told them not to wait for the 4th infantry! Disaster looms. In fact, all that happened was that the U.S. forces made a stop to shore up their supplies and scout out ahead and reformulate plans based on information gained to date. They went on to obliterate the enemy with the lowest casualty count of any major war in history.
So yes, it looks like Saddam is waging a guerrilla war. That was one of the possible outcomes. But as bad outcomes go, so far it’s not as bad as many. We’re not facing an Iraq of millions of starving people, with skies blackened by smoke from flaming oil fields, with tens of thousands of dead, and with a Kurdish war raging in the North. The current problems are an order of magnitude smaller than those predicted by the anti-war side. So let’s not get too snarky about who was ‘completely wrong’. It was a certainty that all of us would be wrong about some things. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Nice trick. Define success as attaining a goal that hasn’t been achieved, and then declare it a total failure. The fact is, Saddam is no longer in power. The U.S. now has a large autonomous base in the heart of the Middle East. The U.S. can now leave Saudi Arabia. The U.S. can now put pressure on Syria and Iran. Millions of Iraqis are now free of a brutal tyrant. These are all concrete goals that have been achieved. I would define the outcome so far as incomplete - a conditional success that won’t be complete until Saddam is dead and the underground guerrilla movement crushed. There is still significant risk. Full success can only be achieved if Iraq becomes a successful state. And that’s still very much in the air. We’ll wait and see.
Tsk, tsk, all that trouble to get illegal WMDs, and they don’t work? Hope Saddam had a receipt so he could get a refund.
This doesn’t make sense – “I’m gonna discredit the US by not attacking with WMDs, and then, once everyone disbelieves them, I’m going to attack with my WMDs and prove they were right all along.”? What kind of half-assed conspiracy theory is this?
Except you conveniently overlooked Occam’s Razor: that Saddam never had WMDs to begin with, and the current spate of attacks is a combination of leftover resistance, pissed-off Iraqis, and newly-arrived terrorists who decide 150,000+ American troops makes for a nice desert turkey shoot.
And the difference between this and your theory is that it fits better with the evidence we have found – no mobile chemical labs, no prohibited SCUD missiles, no WMD-spraying remote drones, no active chemical factories. Unless you’re gonna tell me you believe Saddam folded all that stuff up and stashed them in his hip pocket as well.
Except for the mobile chemical labs, the prohibited SCUD missiles, the WMD-spraying remote dro-- you get the idea.
And you’ll keep on believing it, regardless of the facts, I’m sure. :rolleyes:
You think Saddam had WMD to defend against an armed invasion by technically superior soldiers? WMD are an offensive weapon. They’re good for threatening neighbors and quelling resistance in your own country. They’re a piss-poor tactical weapon.
That’s why I said that he may have destroyed them outright. Or he still may be holding them in reserve, as a weapon of last resort. Emphasis on the ‘last resort’ part.
Except that all the evidence points to Fedayeen as well as extra-national terrorists. The bomb that hit the U.N. was filled with Ordnance from official Iraqi government inventory. The bomb in Najaf was highly sophisticated and detonated by remote control. The sabotage of infrastructure was professional and targeted with precision. The military on the ground thinks its Fedayeen. The CPA thinks its Fedayeen. Before he left here, I think even Collounsbury agreed that it looked like Fedayeen and other ex-military was involved.
The only reason you don’t want to accept this is because it doesn’t fit in with your, “Evil invader being opposed by oppressed population” bias.
A) We don’t know all of what has been found. That case is being made now. B) The drones HAVE been found, but experts say they didn’t have enough payload to be a serious threat for widespread WMD application. The administration may have simply been wrong about that. That’s why you need to get on the ground and inspect at some point. C) You seem to be under the impression that making chemical weapons requires huge factories. The U.S. position was that they could be made in ‘dual use’ facilities that would be impossible to prove unless you found the weapons there. And if you recall, part of the U.S. case showed evidence of the sanitization of those facilies. As for mobile labs, well, they may also have been wrong about them, or they may also be ‘dual use’, or they may be buried. I expect more evidence about that from David Kay. We’ll have to see.
One other possibility is that Saddam let the west believe he had WMD when he didn’t, because he felt that it would act as a deterrant, and he believed until the end that the U.S. would back down. He may have felt that the threat of WMD was just as valuable as having them, and didn’t carry the risks of them being found. Maybe we’ll find out if that’s the case soon as well.
Sam, you’ve been asked before. Kay’s report is supposed to be the final word for you dead-enders, and you’re confident that some case or other will be proven. What will you admit to us if/when that doesn’t happen?
The last paragraph of that last post shows some sense. Pity you so totally refused to consider that when it was presented to you in time to stop the damn killings.
Scylla, I’m sure you could contribute some real discussion to this thread if you wanted to.
Well, Saddam would still have been killing tens of thousands of people a year, so… Oh, you mean the WAR!
Sorry, I would have supported it anyway. Saddam was a brutal monster who was terrorizing his people. The war was justified on those grounds alone.
I am. I corrected your falsehood.