No WMD. Sorry for getting you killed

The Coffee Shop
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WASHINGTON (AP) – Contradicting the main argument for a war that has cost more than 1,000 American lives, the top U.S. arms inspector reported Wednesday that he found no evidence that Iraq produced any weapons of mass destruction after 1991. He also concluded that Saddam Hussein’s weapons capability weakened during a dozen years of U.N. sanctions before the U.S. invasion last year.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/06/iraq.wmd.report.ap/index.html

This entire saga is the greatest fleecing of the American people in history (and sadly, there are those that still support our leaders). What a fuck show.

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Actually, I read a lot. But please, enlighten me. What am I being naive about? Our President lied. A factual statement cannot be naive.

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Saddam’s own head of nuclear weapons development has been traveling the country saying that Saddam actively pumped money into planning for weapons once he was out from under U.N. oversight. In fact, he says he was ordered to hide the plans for centrifuge development (the centrifuge is one of the most critical pieces of equipment needed for weapons-grade plutonium enrichment) in his own front yard, under a bush, until Iraq was free of the sanctions regime.

He also engaged in a dangerous game, in a dangerous neighborhood in the Middle East, of ACTING like he had weapons, even if he didn’t have them (which is still not determined as you’re searching a country the size of California with basically a small shovel) so as to scare off the aggressive tendencies of his Iranian enemy. Let alone the credible evidence of possible weapons movement into Syria (which is also Ba’athist), in the weeks leading up to the invasion. Saddam did this same thing in the run-up to the air war in the '91 Gulf War, when he had all of his planes flown into Iran for sanctuary.

Also, do you think for one second that if the fundamentalist Ayatollahs in Iran thought Saddam didn’t have WMDs of one sort or another, that they wouldn’t have immediately tried to undermine and destabilize his rule?

He pulled an old gag…he ACTED like he had a big gun in his pocket, so as to scare away the mugger. Unfortunately for him, it backfired. I don’t feel the least bit of regret over it, and he brought all of this on himself.

It’s a hard old world out there.

Tony

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Since you seem to have read the full report and come to a different conclusion, how about cluing the rest of us in?

It seems to me that the report makes clear that Saddam wasn’t actively pursuing a WMD program, because the sanctions were working exactly as intended. Saying that he would have pursued their development after sanctions were lifted is puerile.

Further, it seems that even if he had been able to pursue WMDs, he was more interested in them as a defense against Iran than an attack on the US.

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careful vitus, you’re making sense. you might get flamed for it.

and by the way, the part where duelfer states hussein was more interested in using wmd’s(if he had them) against iran is much more damaging, in my opinion, than the fact that he didn’t have wmd’s in the first place.

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Did that before I posted. It’s pretty simple: There were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq. Not sure how many ways there are to interpret that statement.

Contrary to prewar statements by President Bush and top administration officials, Saddam did not have chemical and biological stockpiles when the war began and his nuclear capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, according to the report by Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group.

I’m happy to have you change my mind if you can point out something I’m missing.

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So let me understand this, and assuming what you say is true (which neither of us really knows for sure): It’s ok to bomb the shit out of some country because they act like they have WMD stockpiles. In the case of a police officer killing a fugitive because he acts like he has a gun, sure, I’ll buy that. But in that case there are no innocent people being killed in the process (bystanders and other police officers).

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Oh yeah, nothing of what you said contradicts the finding that there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq. Intending to plan to create weapons at some point in the future is one thing. Actually having weapons stockpiled is an entirely different matter.

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I think Don Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have been great in the last two days. Give anyone enough rope…

Mr Rumsfeld was asked by a New York audience about connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

“To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two,”

In an attack that stunned Washington, Paul Bremer, the “proconsul” of Iraq until the handover in late June, said the administration had made two serious mistakes. It had not sent enough troops and had compounded this by not curbing the violence and lawlessness that erupted after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

   ![http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2004/10/06/wus06a.jpg](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2004/10/06/wus06a.jpg)   Paul Bremner: not enough troops

“We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” Mr Bremer said in an address in West Virginia. “We never had enough troops on the ground.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1770000/audio/_1773951_rumsfeld_g.ram

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Yes it was right to bomb him and his country. He tried to undermine the sanctions regime from the time he signed the surrender in '91. He kicked inspectors out and ONLY let them back in because he was afraid of the U.S. (not U.N.) response, and he had played a dangerous game of on-again, off-again weapons development and made it SEEM as if he had 'em and would use 'em in the vain hope that his lackeys on the Security Council (France, Russia, China and Germany…all of whom were enriching themselves through the corrup Oil-For-Food Program) would forestall the inevitable U.S. response. Perhaps he would’ve gotten away with it. Who knows? But, in the post-9/11 environment, can we really count on the sincerity of dictators and thugs to do what they’ve already previously shown themselves incapable of doing?

Obeidi also stated that he (Saddam) was ready to IMMEDIATELY begin production of WMDs as soon as he could co-opt enough of the members on the Security Council to bring about an end to sanctions and oversight.

Innocent people die everyday. That can’t stop a nation from protecting its own interests and the safety of it own people, contrary to what Dominique de Villapin and others would have us believe, and the ultimate end of a definable evil such as Saddam’s dictatorship will always justify a moral war, which is what I believe we’re engaged in.

Tony

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He later clarified his statements and he and Bremer both have said that they were quoted out of context. That’s the great thing about our system; nobody has to clear things through a poliburo or some political officer, if they have a mind to say something.

Tony

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"actively pumped money into planning for weapons once he was out from under U.N. oversight. "

So why not keep or tighten the sanctions and stick to the real threat and kill osama? If Al Qaeda nails us again are you going to tell everyone: “Well thank god we took out Iraq before the sanctions accidently fell off…!”

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Saying that he would have pursued their development after sanctions were lifted is puerile.

Hardly… in fact it is the only reasonable assumption IMO.

No doubt that sanctions proved effective but they were hardly a final solution, the major drawback being the lack of verifiable disarmament by Saddam. Not to mention that the oil-for-food was a joke and simply funneled money into Saddam’s palace fund while the people starved. So do the opponents of the war prefer that sanctions had gone on indefinitely, or eased to appease European business interests, or what?

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well I’d believe that except for the fact that there were multiple journalists present for the entire conversation so I am just curious how he might have been misquoted when the transcript of what Rumsfeld said was as follows?

QUESTIONER: My name is Glenn Hutchins. Mr. Secretary, what exactly was the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda?

RUMSFELD: I tell you, I’m not going to answer the question. I have seen the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community over the period of a year in the most amazing way. Second, there are differences in the intelligence community as to what the relationship was. To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two. There are–I just read an intelligence report recently about one person who’s connected to al Qaeda, who was in and out of Iraq, and there’s the most tortured description of why he might have had a relationship, and why he might not have had a relationship. There are reports about people in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service meeting in one country or another with al Qaeda people from one person to another, which may have been indicative of something, or may not have been. It may have been something that was not representative of a hard linkage.

What we do know is that Saddam Hussein was on the terrorist list. We do know they were giving $25,000 to suicide bombers. So, this is not the Little Sisters of the Poor. But, what I would–to answer it, when I’m in Washington, I pull out a piece of paper and say, I don’t know, because I’m not in that business, but I’ll tell you what the CIA thinks, and I read it–the public version of it. If you want a–not terribly current now, but George Tenet did testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a version of it was unclassified–declassified–later which you can get and read if you want to see the answer that he gave.

But it is–it is–the relationships between these folks are complicated. They evolve and change over time. In many cases, these different networks have common funders. In many cases, they cooperate not in a chain of command, but in a loose affiliation–a franchising arrangement almost, where they go do different things and cooperate, but they’re not, in the case of al Qaeda, most–my impression is, most of the senior people have actually sworn an oath to Osama bin Laden, and even, to my knowledge, even as of this late date, I don’t believe Zarqawi, the principal leader of the network in Iraq, has sworn an oath, even though what they’re doing–I mean, they’re just two peas in a pod in terms of what they’re doing.

So, it is too complicated for me to try to pretend I’m the expert analyst on the subject, and for that I apologize.

Yes sir.

Here is the entire transcript but I have edited verbatim the questiona and response and you tell me which part of what was in the media was misquoted?

To his knowledge there was no connection, what part of that was a misquote?

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-rumsfeldspeech1006,0,5756045.story

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I agree Mr. Tibbs but in my heart there is unfinished business with osama.

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You are obscuring the point by going on-and-on with after-the-fact explanations in an attempt to justify dropping bombs on another country now that Bush’s (changing) reasons for doing so are one-by-one being exposed as lies. The facts don’t change no matter how creatively you theorize what’s really going on behind the scenes.

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**No doubt that sanctions proved effective but they were hardly a final solution **

Why not? They worked in South Africa, didn’t they? And we maintain them in Cuba, right? I never hear anyone whining about how those sanctions hurt the oppressed in those countries. You’re saying that we invaded Iraq to spare the Iraqi people the burdens of our own sanctions?

Let’s stay focused on the key thing here, which is that according to the report, the sanctions were working exactly as they were intended to. There’s no reason to think they wouldn’t continue to work.

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“He later clarified his statements and he and Bremer both have said that they were quoted out of context.”

What I heard from Bremmer wasn’t that he was quoted out of context, but that he wasn’t supposed to be on the record. That’s a big difference.

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Well, as far as I can tell every resource that CAN be directed at him, is being directed at OBL. For one, we don’t really know if he’s already dead, or if he’s still alive. All this talk about Tora-Bora first presupposes that he was even there, and not that he hadn’t already been killed elsewhere or that he hadn’t fled and is in hiding in yet another country or being protected by regional tribespeople sympathetic to his cause. All I know is that he, Ayman al-Zawarhiri (his #2) and Musab al-Zarqawi aren’t doing anything in the U.S., but are rather over there, in one tightly-defineable region, which will make it an eventuality that our forces will fix their location, pin them, and destroy them.

For another thing, you could pour the combined forces of all the U.S. armed services into Afghanistan and still not make a dent, which wouldn’t work, because of the nature of assymetrical warfare that we’re required to engage in by the circumstances of that particular conflict. Smaller units, specializing in overt and covert-operations, intel gathering and analysis, coordination of coalition forces, CIA paramilitary actions…these will be what leads us to Zawarhiri and OBL, if he’s even alive and able to direct a Qaeda operation. The latest video by Zawarhiri showed a man who looked tired and frazzeled. He also took on a somewhat pleading tone in his exhortations to the “faithful” to once again rise up and slay the infidels. Tired stuff, but it plays well in the Catskills, I suppose. :wink:

The Russians also found out about the futility of classic warfare in Afghanistan, by the way. We shouldn’t assume that we’d be any better than they were at trying a country-wide pacification regime. Even Tommy Franks, former Commander of CENTCOM, and head of all forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, has said that the mission task in Afghanistan required personnel unit sizing such as we’ve seen. Forty guys in one 6X10 foot room trying to kill a cockroach may get the roach, but it’s also as likely that they’d end up getting in the way of each other and let the roach escape.

Iraq, on the other hand currently requires military operations of the type and nature that we’re seeing. From the latest reports, American-trained Iraqi forces are finally starting to make qualitative headway against insurgents holed up in the Sunni Triangle cities and in Sadr City in Baghdad (I think Sadr’s forces have agreed to turn in their weapons in exchange for cash). Sammara was retaken by new Iraqi forces, Fallujah is currently undergoing investment by combined Iraqi/U.S. forces and Ramadi is also being hit hard. I’m sure some here will say that this is just propagandistic, but hey…it’s what I see and assess as being what’s happening.

Whether these are new steps designed by the Bush administration in an attempt at influencing both ours and the upcoming Iraqi elections is best left up to the punditry. What’s for certain is that a push is on to get at the insurgency and secure an environment amenable to national elections for Iraq in January of '05.

But let’s face it: No matter what any of us say here, no minds are going to be changed…just as no minds are going to be changed come November 2nd. At the least, maybe what is said here in this forum has fired up enough people to motivate them to get out and vote for their guy, whomever that is :slight_smile:

Tony

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It’s also the great thing about the passing of time and the introduction of fact: One can always “clarify” their statements to meet the current state of things.