Wmd

I thought it was about time we had an actual thread to discuss this matter.
I'm sure there are many that could wax more eloquently on the subject but here goes.

Where are they?
1. Saddam admitted to having them.
2. He used it on the Iranians and his own people.
3.The world said he had them 18 different times through the UN.
4. Scads of Iraqi scientists and officials say they had them.
Are they all lying?
I think not!
5.You don't have mobile Bio/Chemical weapons labs if your not making them and at the same time trying to hide them.

Instead of being accusatory in nature against the US one should ask one's self,Where are they?
Being an American I find this to be a very scary prospect indeed.
Since(and not if)they existed,where are they or who have they been given to?
I don't think I'll be surprised at the next horrific attack by Terrorists as I believe they may have obtained some of these weapons,which in some cases can be as small as a pen and quite easily delivered.
Without even sacrificing one's life in the process.

I said before the Iraqi War that if they were there, they wouldnt be used in that theatre, and how they are very easily smuggled out.

I also said where I believed they could be used, and why they would be used there....ie BECAUSE of the war.




However, to my knowledge no sign of WMD has been found, other than very old labs etc etc.....this makes me tend to think he was 'telling the truth' about getting rid of them.......

....................and I hope to god im right in this, as I would hate to have my predictions come true. :'(

At 1/3 the way through the inspection process, it's too soon to tell whether or not WMD exist in Iraq. And, even afterward, they still might have them. Our ground intelligence in the region was recent and terrible ... and our reliance on spy-in-the-sky technology meant nothing in a country filled with bunkers. I do know that prior to the war, Ivan Scott of ABC radio news reported that a $20,000,000 payment was made by Saddam Hussein to an unknown party in Syria ... and that following this payment, a convoy of trucks headed for the Syrian border. But, since our intelligence was so terrible, that's all we know ... and we can only speculate as to what was being shipped. It could have been WMD. It could have been plundered wealth or artifacts. No one but Saddam Hussein and his friends know. But, to Bush's detriment, one thing is certain. This bad intelligence was on "his watch." I'm willing to give inspection teams the time it takes to go through the remaining uninspected sites before I personally make any judgments on my own. But, if no WMDs are found, Bush has to accept responsibility for not finding them ... and the onus for using WMD as the reason for military action.

One interesting note. Remember early on in the campaign, a desert chemical facility was discovered. It was camoflouged so as to make it hard to see from the nearby road and hard to see from the sky. The facility was determined to be a chemical facility that could produce ANY kind of chemical. No WMD were found there. But, you don't put a camoflouged facility in the middle of the desert and put a General in charge of it if you're making baby powder. :ph34r:

I think they have been disassembled or exported. None will be found and I do not fear that those "missing " weapons will be made available to terrorists.
I am currently mulling the point made by OTD in discussing an article by Friedman (can you post a link to the whole article?).
It appears that although the US will sustain a credibility blow by not recovering weapons of mass destruction, this may not lead to more terrorism.
He contends that terrorists do not exist in a vacuum, they are either directly or indirectly supported by the governments that harbour them.

According to a friend in the military, the response of terroists to Clintons launching of Tomahawk missles against training camps was the opposite to that expected. We were perceived as cowards and this re-enforced their dedication.

We have now answered this mentality in a way it understands, we got up, crawled over the fence and beat the shit out them. Now we can say, "Anyone else think we don't mean business, I'll climb over your fence too! And by the by, we will do it regardless of world opinion"
So now that countries know that UN inspectors and economic sanctions are no longer the gold standard for intervention, maybe they won't be so willing to fund and harbour terrorist groups. They might be next, after all, the US just has to make up a new excuse to attack them.


Goering quoted by cyprushil:

"That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
It works the same in any country."

This quote is spot on in understanding how to manipulate people, regardless of type of government.

Remember that 81% now think that WMD do not need to be found to justify the war. They/we all got played. WMD was the instrument.



So what can we learn? Could Dubyah have gotten on the airway and said, "Saddams a bad man with alot of nice oil. If we go conquer his country we can play with all his oil and send a message to those who harbour terrorists that we will invade them too if they continue this. See people, 2 birds, one stone".

No, that wouldn't sell, we had to be properly manipulated, to get us "in the mood".


I can't remember the movie, but the line fits:

"I don't give you enough information to think, you do what I tell you".

That is how I feel about this whole war thing. There are agenda behind agendas all built on classified objectives that we aren't allowed to know. So how can we make educated decisions when we don't even know what the variable are.

All countries do this, I use America as a microcosm of democratic countries, not as an outlier. We all don't even know what we don't know.





I reserve the right to clean this up later, coffee buzzin'

addendum 1: give credit to myfiles3000 for Friedman post, I was just aware of it through a different one by OTD which gave just a few lines.

Quote:

---

Hobbes wrote:

I am currently mulling the point made by OTD in discussing an article by Friedman (can you post a link to the whole article?).

---

Ask and ye shall receive.

Quote:

---

It appears that although the US will sustain a credibility blow by not recovering weapons of mass destruction, this may not lead to more terrorism. He contends that terrorists do not exist in a vacuum, they are either directly or indirectly supported by the governments that harbour them.

---

Correct. What he's suggesting is this. Radical Islamists hated us before Iraq. And, they still hate us. But before Iraq, they saw the USA as a rattlesnake with no teeth. Now they've seen the teeth. But more importantly, regional governments that sanction terrorist havens within their borders have seen the teeth ... and given the choice between survival of their respective governments and allowing terrorist havens within their borders, they're likely to choose survival. You can hate a rattlesnake but, at the same time, respect it:

http://novelhost.net/gadsdenflag.gif

And that's probably the quiet victory we achieved in Iraq which Friedman alluded to.

On the other hand, for terrorists to retain credence and stature, the immediate effect might be a push toward some "dramatic" act of terror ... as if to say, "We ain't dead, yet." But woe be to the country that harbors them. It's kind-of like the situation in Northern Ireland. Britain still retains control, even after years of bloody disputes. The way they did this is relatively simple. As long as you can create a situation where the Catholics and Protestants are at odds with one another, they won't have enough energy left over to fight the common foe ... Britain. Likewise, as long as we can create a situation where terrorists and the countries that harbor them are at odds with one another, they might not have enough energy left over to fight the common foe ... the Great Satan.

http://novelhost.net/madsdenflag.gif (Just kidding.)

Great read!
All of you.
Hobbes you can really write quite well.
No wonder you wanted to have a go round
Hobbes,about the goering thing,While understanding it,I don't believe this is the case here.
While I'll admit it could be, but so could a lot of other theories.
I'm on the right but I'm not naive.
I agree with most of your assessments except I think your view is slightly shaded by conspiracys.

i saw a woman the other day with "weapons of mass distraction" written on her t shirt.

that's about as deep as i'm gonna get on this topic. can't be bothered to argue

According to Bush's State of the Union Address:
Iraq possessed: 25,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres of botulinum, 500 tons of sarin, mustard, and VX nerve agent & 30,000 munitions to deliver chemical agents.
So far U.S. forces have inspected at least 90% of "top weapons sites" finding no chemical agents and weapons, while 46,830,000 lbs of banned chemical weapons are kept at an Army depot in Anniston, Alabama.
Interdicting WMD was the stated objective of the US campaign, the failure to find any may just be the transit time from Alabama, or it may be a great big hole in the USA's facade.
The States united, were lied to and deceived either by the white house or the agencies informing that house. the fact the the USA can act in a brutally belligerent military way unilaterally surprises no one who has read of Kissinger's operation breakfast and other operations in laos and cambodia where 'war' did not even officially exist.
The fact that such belligerence is justified upon such spurious evidence and the fact that 'the greatest democracy on earth' seems able to accept this betrayal so easily is surprising.
quite obviously they would have been sold, if they existed in the quantities bush indicated [maybe he got the receipts from daddy] :lol: they should not be able to remain hidden [maybe they've been found but they're all marked made in texas] :lol:

'the world now fears the USA's belligerency more than it had' is about all anyone has been able to say in terms of US interests having been served by the war. If the WMD bush spoke of exist at that time they were in the hands of one of the most brutal paranoid and well protected mothers on the planet [so well protected that neither bush has been able to hit him]. You[USA] 'knew' where they[WMD] were 'cause you had a 12 year old stalemate. now who has them? are they as secure as saddam kept them? where are they?
The world is demonstrably less secure now than before 'Iraqi freedom', well done, i hope as many of the kids bush jnr sent there get home ASAP :(

willful blindness + undue emphasis = regime change

i'd like to point out a news story from a month or 2 ago about intelligence reports concerning the sale of "yellow cake" from an African country to Iraq, a pre-cursur to either nuclear or radioactive weapons. Turned out to be an absurdly incompetent forgery, but this didn't stop the information from flowing up to the highest levels of US government. I posted the story to the board.

"wilful blindness' i'm sure played a big role in all of this WRT the poor quality of evidence against Iraq, combined with 'undue emphasis' on anything possibly construed as incriminating. its all shades of grey, where your priorities are, and the latitude that discretion affords.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by hobbes@5 June 2003 - 00:13
I can't remember the movie, but the line fits:

"I don't give you enough information to think, you do what I tell you".

---

I think it was in "Total Recall", but it's probably in many films... ;)