The real shame is that we even are having this discussion.
I almost posted the exact same thread two days ago. Unless Saddam uses WoMD, there will always be a little birdie going “but those could be planted”. And it’s all because this administration totally botched the pre-war.
One bet I’d love for someone to take: What are the odds that we will NOT find (or ‘find’) WoMD. I’d say about…zero.
Optihut wrote: I’m still pretty sure Bush confirmed that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction
Flat wrong. Monday night, Bush declared that Saddam has still not disarmed. Do you have a cite showing Bush believes Saddam has disarmed?
Optihut wrote: If you include me into your assumption, you would be wrong. … I’d bet you’re wrong about the other people too.
Fine. Despite the fact that many people on this board have stated that they assume that any wmd found in Iraq will have to be planted there, and despite the fact that none of these people has explicitly said so, I’ll be charitable and assume that your position is the more nuanced “even though Saddam may still have WMD, all WMD found in Iraq will be planted.” Interesting how you will selectively concede that Saddam might have WMD when it serves the purpose of strengthening your case against U.S. dirty tricks. Doesn’t it also strengthen Bush’s case?
Optihut wrote: Nobody said the inspectors are liars. In fact, the inspectors are the most credible of all parties involved. If Iraq was supposed to disarm and the inspectors didn’t find any weapons, wouldn’t the conclusion be that Iraq did disarm?
This is a basic misunderstanding of the function of inspectors. They are not detectives. Their function is to review evidence presented by a regime, and to report on that regime’s compliance. The burden of proof, then, is indeed on Saddam, as it has been in every other UN disarmament, because the UN inspectors are not equipped to search all of a country for evidence. Saddam is universally known to have manufactured WMD (ask any Kurd), and he has not accounted for them. The fact that you think the inspectors have concluded or should conclude that “Iraq did disarm” is simply massively ignorant of fact (as they have not come to this conclusion), and gives Saddam an astonishing amount of trust and credit, which leads me back to my initial question: why do you give Saddam so much credit?
Yes, Bush’s diplomacy has been terrible, and yes, it would have been great to get a second resolution. But given that France threatened to veto any resolution that backed diplomacy with force (the only method with a chance of working), finding a diplomatic solution to the problem “according to the rules” became impossible. Given a choice between resolving the problem and not resolving it, breaking the rules seems a better route. And 1441 certainly provides Bush with an adequate amount of legitimacy.
All of which gets back to my perception of the comments on this thread that are so skeptical towards the US, assuming that any WMD will be planted by Bush. To believe this, you run into two problems, neither of which you addressed in your response: 1)you must ignore the inspectors who continue to complain of Iraq’s failure to account for its weapons – a point which you, Optihut, are not responding to, instead papering over it by saying how credible you think the UN is. Well, if you believe the inspectors are credible, start paying attention to what they say – that Saddam probably still has WMD. 2) You must also extend the benefit of the doubt to Saddam – something you would never do for Bush – which is the truest sign of the emptiness of your “skepticism.” Will you address these two points this time?
Would George W. Bush use a nonexistent Atomic Energy Commission to justify a war?
Would the Administration use forged intelligence documents of Iraqi nuclear purchases to rally supporters to its side?
Would Dick Cheney insist that a post-war Iraq would inspire democracy in the Middle East, even after the State Department concluded this was a “not credible” result?
Would Colin Powell go before the United Nations and argue in favor of war using an “intelligence report” that was plagarized from a California postgraduate student?
You’re going to make a distinction? So now we can just put “I think” in front of any statement and it is OK?
I think there is zero difference between saying “I think you’re an idiot” and “You’re an idiot.” As if in the latter I’m going to a ssume he has some irrefutable proof of it and he is not stating an opinion but rather a fact. Zero difference.
Of course I was being facetious with the whole “put it in the Pit” thing. I just can’t stand it when people say “We have a difference of opinion and I think you’re an idiot if you disagree with me.”
My dislike of that statement still stands.
—My personal problem is that I would be deeply suspicious of such an event, given that the weapons inspectors were unable to find things even with the “US Intelligence” provided to them.—
I still don’t quite understand this. There are all sorts of news reports floating around about how we’ll have special ops teams going into sites where the WMD are: and its presented as if we know for sure where to send these guys (we’re even going to hold off on bombing them to avoid spreading chemicals and agents). Nowadays, it’s been changed to “they’re going to hunt for,” but previous reports with military officials sounded more sure. Even now, it’s “600 suspected sites.”
So, if we knew all this, and were even willing to speak openly about it… what happened to the inspections process?
Considering the size of the reported discrepancies in the tonnage of both chemical and bio agents, it would be pretty hard to sneak that stuff in and plant it.
Most of the Iraqi material is going to be in a dual use format ,rather than bombs and shells marked with the chem/bio sticker and best before date.
But out of curiosity , what would you concider to be factual evidence that what’s being reported , is not actually fake or planted.
Declan
Here’s another, related question:
do you think that reports on torture, rape and murder in Iraq are fabrications put out by the Bush administration? When we come across facilities and people involved in human rights abuses, will you call these manufactured as well?
It’s always imperative to hold our governments to hard questioning. I just get fed up when I see fellow liberals use these questions not to lead to action, but passivity. The end result of this kind of intense cynicism has not been a strengthening of liberal principles of peace, justice and progress, but rather anti-Bush nihilism. Sadly, that’s what’s lurking at the heart of this thread, IMHO.
Heh, heh, heh, it’s kind of funny what happened to the story. Turns out that the bad guys had found an internet site which purported to have all the information on building an atomic bomb, but once you closely examined it, you realized that it was an elaborate hoax! No word on if the bad guys were smart enough to figure it out or not. (My source for this was a thread here on the Dope, but I don’t remember the details, nor the links which the thread had.)
Most of the evidence of WMD will be bombed, partially or mostly destroyed, a paper trail will be near impossible to dig up and it would be a miracle if they found a stash of WMD intact. We are going to be bombing the place pretty thoroughly.
Best case scenario for all around is for an Iraqi high ranking military officer to surrender his WMD munitions and delivery system and testify about their existance along with corroborating evidence.
Lets see you prove we planted that!
The “you” in the statement was entirely generic. It didn’t specifically refer to any person in this thread. It was the generic usage, e.g. “You would have to be crazy to pur gasoline on your head and then play with fireworks.”
Kingpengvin: two points…
“Recent history shows that no conspiracy remains a secret”. This is an odd argument. Basically all one can say is that so conspiracy that has failed to remain secret remains a secret. How can we possibly know about it if it still remains a secret? How can we possibly make a blanket statement based on something that is by definition unknown?
In addressing faked evidence:“So, You know they are phony. How? A good guess? Were you there? Are you Psychic? Do you have an inside plant?” Well, Mr. Elbaradei, the head of the IAEA, seems to think Bush is trying to pass forged documentation:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59403-2003Mar7.html
Hey, two good quotes:
“None of the nuclear-related intelligence trumpeted by the administration has held up to scrutiny, inspectors say. From suspect aluminum tubes to aerial photographs to documents – revealed to be forgeries – that claimed to link Iraq to uranium from Niger, inspectors say they chased U.S. leads that went nowhere and wasted valuable time in their efforts to determine the extent of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons banned after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.”
-snip-
“Recent inspection teams have included a new batch of U.S. nuclear scientists from Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories. The U.N. official described these inspectors as arriving as hawks and leaving as doves, after finding Iraq ``a ruined country, not a threat to anyone.’’ It is a view radically different than the administration’s.”
Conclusion: either it was an intentional wild goose chase, or our intelligence agencies suck eggs.
Which one is it?
Hey, two good quotes:
“None of the nuclear-related intelligence trumpeted by the administration has held up to scrutiny, inspectors say. From suspect aluminum tubes to aerial photographs to documents – revealed to be forgeries – that claimed to link Iraq to uranium from Niger, inspectors say they chased U.S. leads that went nowhere and wasted valuable time in their efforts to determine the extent of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons banned after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.”
-snip-
“Recent inspection teams have included a new batch of U.S. nuclear scientists from Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories. The U.N. official described these inspectors as arriving as hawks and leaving as doves, after finding Iraq ``a ruined country, not a threat to anyone.’’ It is a view radically different than the administration’s.”
Conclusion: either it was an intentional wild goose chase, or our intelligence agencies suck eggs.
Which one is it?
source: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/5418901.htm
I think what we’re talking about here is the concept of “reasonable doubt”.
Do I believe that Saddam is a tyrant, who is brutally treating the population of Iraq? Yes, because there has already been fairly visible evidence of his nasty-assed behavior, various third-party reporters have (over the last ten years) reported on the miserable conditions under the Ba’ath regime, and also because most of the countries in the Eastern Med are fairly miserable when it comes to things like human rights.
Do I believe that Saddam has abundant quantities of viable biological weapons of mass destruction, which he is cleverly hiding from the US intelligence agencies, with a mixture of electronic intelligence, human intelligence, satellites and spy-planes? Do I believe that Saddam is so cunning that the US has been unable to direct the UN inspection teams to one single site where this might actually be stored? No, because I like to think that the US is pretty good at finding out about this sort of stuff.
I was really really really hoping that sometime in the last 4 months, the US government could come up with a credible site for biological weapon storage, and could then move a UN inspection team to that site. Didn’t happen. Heck, we didn’t even get compelling satellite/surveillance footage of a bunch of trucks scattering from a suspected site as the UN inspectors approached,
That’s my doubt.
Great. Now we’re getting somewhere. By your logic, there cannot be WMD in Iraq because if there were, the United States would have been able to find them or point them out to inspectors. And as a correlary, Saddam happens to be telling the truth about his disarmament (he’s still a bad guy, of course; just not sufficiently “cunning”), while Bush and Blair are simply lying, perhaps for reasons of oil, empire, psychology, or some other ultimately unprovable charge. Of course, this perspective is only convincing if you ignore points that I and others have already raised in this thread. I will reiterate them because this lazy nihilism shouldn’t be given a pass.
Weapons inspectors have repeatedly stated that, before they were kicked out in 1998, there was evidence of 550 shells and 450 bombs filled with mustard gas; 6,526 bombs containing about 1,000 tons of chemical warfare compounds; 10,000 liters of anthrax; and up to 19,000 liters of botulinum toxin. Now, given that Blix stated on March 7 and on other occasions that none of this has been accounted for; and given that you think Saddam must have destroyed all of this stuff (because, as you say, the U.S. would have found it if he hadn’t), you have to start extending Saddam a pretty significant benefit of the doubt for why he can’t account for it all, something the U.N. certainly does not do. In this case, maybe Saddam is having trouble proving he’s destroyed his WMD because the evidence is technically difficult to produce, or because he’s really disorganized, or some similar explanation. The point is, you are filling in blanks here, trying to show why Saddam is actually in compliance. You’re doing his job for him.
Again, I ask: why do you give Saddam credit you are so patently unwilling to give Bush?
In addition, the logic of your position (your belief that Saddam has already destroyed his WMD) leads unavoidably to the conlusion that the UN is either lying or incompetent when it says that Saddam has failed to account for his poisons. Which is it?
Ultimately, this is nihilism masquerading as liberalism. You have to do some serious moral contortions – Bush is untrustworthy, but Saddam is not; the UN is wrong or lying, but Saddam is not – to get to “reasonable doubt,” Scruff. Are you going to actually address these points this time?
I thought that’s what “innocent until proven guilty” was all about. 
Tomyoung: who are you addressing?
By the way, if I demand for you to show me you DONT have any strawberry ice cream, will you be able to supply the necessary documentation?
I then come into your house, look in your fridge (because a friend told me he saw some there at some point), dont find any there, yet conclude that you MUST have some because you had some last week.
To shore up my accusation I produce a receipt from Bi-Lo. Unfortunately, when some other people look at it, it appears that it was made on a word processor, and “ice cream” is spelled wrong.
Finally I drop a bomb on your house. I demolish the whole thing. Just a pile of rubble left. Miraculously I find a carton of ice cream!!
Of course, the ice cream may have been there all along. Maybe you had it hiding under your bed. I didnt look there.
Declan:
If WMD are used against US or allied troops in battle, thats a pretty convincing.
If, as you point out, huge quantities are found, thats also pretty convincing.
Lets wait and see.
I don’t give credit at all. Right now I seem to be critizing Bush more, becaue he’s the one who wants to start a war. He’s the one who told the weapons inspectors to pack their things and stop their work and because he is a DEMOCRATIC leader and not some third rate dictator.
As for points I have allegedly ignored: I am of the opinion that the weapons inspectors should be given the time to work. After all, they weren’t convinced that their work is hopeless. Bush decided that for them, totally ignoring and disregarding their work.
That makes him appear like someone who is hell bent on starting a war. Something that doesn’t suit a democratic leader at all. You might disagree, but I sure hope you don’t 
All right, that’s a common ground we can reach 
Glad we’re getting somewhere, even if it is pushing me into an uncomfortable corner. I have the following (possibly contradictory) opinions:
(a) I don’t think that Saddam has intentionally destroyed many of his biological WoMD – I think that many of them have expired/exceeded their shelf-life. That is, he may well have drums of sludge somewhere in the basement of the Baghdad Center for Baby Food Manufacture and Weapons Research. But I don’t think that what he has is still potent. I have a vague memory of an article a couple of months ago in ?New Scientist? or ?Scientific American? or something like that (I’m at work now; if this damned build works I’ll spend some time looking for it tonight) which pointed out that the “shelf-life” of most of these weapons was a few years, and that any stuff which SH had back after Gulf War I was most certainly inert by now. Given that Iraq has been besieged for the last decade, I don’t see him replenishing his stocks of biologicals on a massive scale.
The chemical stuff – who knows? Is mustard gas that much of a problem these days? I mean, it works well on a village of unportected Kurds (when the wind is in the right direction) but I’m not sure how much of a threat it is to a modern army.
(b) I cannot answer the question as to why no-one has found credible evidence as to where the stuff is. Maybe if inspections had gone on longer (and we did seem to be making some progress on that front; I guess the US/UK forcres massing on the border did provide a strong incentive for some limited cooperation), we might have found more of the stuff. I don’t think SH destroyed the stuff. I’m not sure how much of the (for example) “19,000 litres of botulism toxin” actually ever existed. NO, I’m not saying that the UN/US/UK/vast global conspiracy made up the number, but I wonder if it was based on the same sort of exaggerated accounting that has been used in the “War on Drugs” where a car-trunk of cocaine was (by the time the evening news rolled around) said to have a street value of $!Billion!.
© (As I said somewhere else) Bush has not made the case for this war to me. I have no strong sense of why we are fighting this war at this time, other than “we can” and “we know where he is” (more or less) and “he tried to kill my Daddy”. I feel that we have squandered a lot of good-will and support for the “War on Terror” by attacking one of the few Arab givernments that bin Laden himself wanted to overthrow and replace (SH has a secular government, OBL prefers a faith-based giovernment similar to the Taliban).
(d) Of course, points (b) and © will be magically solved if we find a cache of Weapons of Mass Destruction (possibly still with the French shipping labels on them), so I cynically think that if necessary the Bush folks might “create” a photo opportunity (which is how this thread started).
(e) I think that Saddam Hussein is a nasty little dictator, and I do think the world will be a better place without him in power (or his sons, or possibly the whole damned Ba’ath party). I am in general disbelieving of everything he is reported to be saying. Equally, I am not convinced that George Walker Bush/Don Rumsfeld/Dick Cheney are honest and above reproach. (Rumsfeld especially strikes me as a loose cannon). I’m not faulting GWB for not being a good public speaker; God knows he has a hard job to do even on the good days (and this has not been the smoothest Presidency). But I was more convinced by the Tony Blair speech yesterday that the war is necessary than by anything I’ve heard from the Bush Administration in the last three months. And that worries me too.
Look tomyoung, I don’t know the answers to these questions. I feel (as an engineer/scientist) that I or someone close to me should be able to answer these questions. The fact that I can’t get answers to these questions is driving me mad (not a long trip, I know).
I mean, the British attacked Hitler (a popular comparison) because he had invaded Poland and was attacking other countries as time went on). The Americans declared war on Japan because of Pearl Harbor, and supported the British as part of the same war. The Americans supported the government of S Korea and S Vietnam to prevent the spread of the “communist menace”. The US/UK/UN got involved in Gulf War I because the Iraqis had invaded Kuwait.
But this one – who knows? I don’t, and I don’t trust the Bush administration enough to give them the benefit of the doubt.
And, by the way, I have no idea what “Ultimately, this is nihilism masquerading as liberalism.” means, but it sounds wonderful (sincerely).
Thank you for giving me the chance to make a gibbering fool of myself in this public forum. I shall now return to the cursed world of C++ coding…