Saddam and The Kurds

[SpoofyChop]

An email sent in to

http://www.Instapundit.com



I am in Irbil in Kurdistan northern Iraq. Someone explained the history of this place to me today. The mountains here are bare and devoid of trees. They used be forested. Covered with trees. There used to be so many trees in Irbil that you couldn't see around corners. Now it looks like Kansas or really more like parts of Montana.

The reason is that Saddam cut down all of the trees in Kurdistan in 1988. He bulldozed 4000 of the 5000 villages in Kurdistan and the Kurds ran to the mountains for safety, so he cut down all of the trees on these mountains and killed all of the game, so that the Kurds would have no wood for fires and no food to eat. He was incredibly effective. The Kurds are now replanting the trees. You can see hundreds of tiny trees if you look closely at the mountains. I didn't notice them until they were pointed out to me. In Kirkuk they found a mass grave of Kurdish children. One of the U.N. guys offered to take us out and show it to us. I haven't taken him up on it. I have no reason to go there and I feel like it would be disrespectful to go and gawk. I guess some of the children were buried with their toys and dolls.

It makes me sick everytime I surf the net and see all these people in Europe and back home saying that the war was not justified because we haven't found 50 tons of sarin gas yet. I wish those people would come to this country and look at ruined villages between here and Kirkuk and the bare mountains. Anyone who protested against this war and defended Saddam ought to be ashamed of themselves. Its just unimaginable the things that went on here.

[Rywill]

As I've said many times before, I was in favor of the war, and was in favor of it partially because of the terrible things Saddam did. But I think this misses the point of the current debate, which is whether the US and its allies exaggerated or outright fabricated evidence of WMD in Iraq in order to get support for the war.

I don't know whether they did or not or, if they did, how much they did. Maybe it was a series of honest mistakes and overestimations. Maybe the WMD are there and just haven't been found yet. Those things are certainly possible. It definitely seems unlikely that Saddam would risk his own destruction and would insure that the sanctions remained in place if he didn't have anything to hide.

Even so, though, if it turns out that the US did lie about the WMD, stuff like this email is completely irrelevant. If your point is that Saddam was so terrible that we were right to take him out whether he had WMD or not, I might agree with you, but that's beside the point--because that's not what the Bush administration said it was doing. If they thought Saddam had to go because of human rights violations, they could and should have said so. If the country wouldn't back that idea and Bush felt like he couldn't go to war without the will of the people, then he shouldn't go to war. It would be wrong (if this is what happened) for Bush to decide: "Saddam has to go because of the human rights violations. But the public will never agree to that and I can't go to war without public support. So I'll make up a bunch of lies about how Saddam has WMD, to get people on board. In the end, they'll just be agreeing to go to war, which is the right thing anyway."

[SpoofyChop]

It would be wrong (if this is what happened) for Bush to decide: "Saddam has to go because of the human rights violations. But the public will never agree to that and I can't go to war without public support. So I'll make up a bunch of lies about how Saddam has WMD, to get people on board. In the end, they'll just be agreeing to go to war, which is the right thing anyway."

I agree with you that that would be wrong. Good thing that's absolutely not what happend!

:D

Also...I just never cease to be amazed at what a horrible murdering fiend Saddam was.


I do have a feeling that the WMD question may end up being essentially unanswerable. Unless we find the weapons we may never know what the situation really was.

I think that you still aren't mentioning the real legal basis for the war which was not the possibility of Saddam having WMD, but rather his failure to PROVE that he didn't have WMD.

That is what all the resolutions called for. He had to unilaterally demonstrate that he had definitely disarmed. He never did and he payed the consequences.

The only reason I can think of that so many people are latching onto this faux "Bush lied about WMD" meme is because it's the only issue that casts even a slight shadow over what was actually one of the most amazing and successful military campaigns in history.

[XPav]

The only reason I can think of that so many people are latching onto this faux "Bush lied about WMD" meme is because it's the only issue that casts even a slight shadow over what was actually one of the most amazing and successful military campaigns in history.
Bullshit. It could possible be that the President lied to the entire country and took us to war under false pretenses.

He said that Iraq posed an imminent theat to the United States. Powell got up there and told us all about the evil mobile germ labs (and by the way, those vehicles they found might not (http://slate.msn.com/id/2083760/) be anything more than hydrogen producers for artillery & weather balloons) and told up about this whole program to play hide the WMD.

We've found shit.

What's more interesting is all the people that jumped on Clinton for lying about getting a blow job are all of a sudden making excuses for Bush and saying that WMD wasn't a big deal in the first place.

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

The only reason I can think of that so many people are latching onto this faux "Bush lied about WMD" meme is because it's the only issue that casts even a slight shadow over what was actually one of the most amazing and successful military campaigns in history.
Bullshit. It could possible be that the President lied to the entire country and took us to war under false pretenses.

The end justified the means. Live with it. Or don't.

[Toddy]

Slight shadow? It's beginning to look like the casus belli was a flat-out lie. Britain's really starting to look into things, with full parliamentary inquiries on what Tony Blair presented to both the house and the public at large. Judging by the way the heat is being ratcheted up there, it seems likely that Labour will turf Blair at some point in the near future.

It's interesting that Britain is actually asking these hard questions about the war, while the US is ignoring even the suggestion of something untoward. Where's the world's leading democracy now? Where's Congress? The US has occupied another country, possibly under false pretences, and thrown a society into anarchy, yet all the American people can do is watch Bush land on an aircraft carrier and put Martha Stewart into the spotlight for goofy insider trading charges. No matter what you think of the war and the reasons behind it, questions need to be answered. Hell, even Paul Wolfowitz is saying that the WMD thing was "bureaucratic." That's pretty interesting, because just a few months back Bush and Blair were telling everyone that Saddam was developing the capability to blow up the entire region.

[Ignatius P. Reilly]

Actually the people who ought to be ashamed are not those who protested the war, but those who launched it with a promise to the Turks that whatever happened, the Kurds would not be freed from Iraq to have their own nation. Those people would be our President and his administration.

They would have never made that promise if they were motivated by the Kurdish situation in their push to war. It is an immoral promise, and an arrogant one; it presumes that the United States has the right to subject a people to a permanent status as an oppressed minority in order to achieve its own self-absorbed diplomatic aims.

To attempt to use the Kurds now to justify the war in place of the lies about weapons of mass destruction propagated on the American public is disingeneous, to say the least.

[Jason McCullough]

You know, even I thought Iraq had WMD, I just didn't think it was a threat. Looks like either Pollack lied to me or he got snowed.

All these moralistic posthoc justifications for the invasion are such bullshit. I'm sure the rank and file is well-meaning, but the leadership is just shedding crocodile tears. They supported columbian death squads, remember?

[Rywill]

No matter what you think of the war and the reasons behind it, questions need to be answered.

Exactly. Spoofy, I agree that Saddam was in violation of the resolutions, and that the resolutions basically say that if he's in violation, we can go to war. No argument. The question, though, is this: did the American public want to go to war? Because it's not like Bush just got up there and said "Saddam's in violation, let's roll." He said Saddam had WMD. If that was a lie, that's a huge issue in my mind, comparable to Watergate. You say that's not what happened. I guess I'm not as sanguine about the whole thing. What makes you think that's not what happened?

And I reject Derek's "end justifies the means" analysis. I don't think it does. An American president obviously does not need to tell the American public everything he knows; much must be kept secret. But an American president should never lie to the public to get them to go to war because the president thinks he knows, better than everyone else does, whether it's morally right to go to war. If he thinks he knows better than everyone else, he should just go to war and say "I know things you don't." If he's proven right, I'm sure he'll come out fine.

[DrCrypt]

That's right, guys. Keep on believing that the complete lack of evidence that Saddam destroyed any of the WMD he admitted to having right after the Gulf War (and still unaccounted for by admission of the UN) is just some wacky misunderstanding between bureaucracies. I'm sure the Iraqis were being honest about it after all.

And remember, WMD are best stored in a conspicuous mountain shaped arrangement of warheads and plutonium in the middle of, say, the CNN Baghdad parking lot. This makes the fact that CNN hasn't reported on them being found after almost two months (!) proof that the weapons Saddam swore he had and the UN inspectors actually found (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/10/1047144926179.html) before the invasion never really existed to begin with.

There was loads of evidence before the invasion, much of it coming from the UN itself, that Iraq hadn't disarmed and wasn't complying. Third parties objectively considering the Iraq debate, like Ken Pollack, took the existence of Saddam's WMD as unassailable. Trying to break it down into "Bush lied" is a such an ugly distortion that I'm not sure whether to think the people spreading it just have no memory for history besides whatever meme they absorbed from today's editorial comic pages, or just addle-minded. If Saddam didn't have WMD, then everyone was fooled, except the people who naysayed everything (like the rape camps and the jails full of children) to begin with.

[Jason McCullough]

The Cornier, Too (http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/001909.html#001909)


SADDAM VOTED FOR MONDALE [John Whaleburg]

A reader writes:

?

One of the problems with explaining Quantum Iraqi Invasion Nano-Dynamics to the layman is that many of its most fundamental results can be so counter-intuitive. For example, consider the WMD wave function, which describes (or, more precisely, whose square describes) how the probability of finding WMD caches in Iraq changes over time and space. In a 24-dimensional manifold, this wave function conserves Einstein symmetries when rotated about any non-forbidden Higgs-Frum conjugate axis. What this implies is that any non-degenerate WMD particle is, when viewed from an eigenaxis, its own anti-particle, which means it instantly annihilates itself in inverse hyperbolic anti-time, causing the Big Bang to happen. Hence, in a seeming paradox, the absence of WMD in Iraq not only proves that they exist, but also explains how our universe came to be created from nothing. Seems strange, but physics tells us that this is not only logically consistent, but logically required. And, conversely, if we did find WMD, it could very easily set in motion a set of processes which would cause the universe to wink out of existence entirely, something which would no doubt please far Left moral relativists like Jim Jeffords and Brent Scowcroft. Or else they fell through a wormhole into Syria.


There was loads of evidence before the invasion, much of it coming from the UN itself, that Iraq hadn't disarmed and wasn't complying.

Then where is it? Why is that one Iraqi general saying that Saddam destroyed it all in the mid-90s? Why are a torrent of CIA leaks coming out that they were pressured to make up evidence? Why is the right suddenly so disaparging towards the WMD justifications they were using just two months ago?


If Saddam didn't have WMD, then everyone was fooled, except the people who naysayed everything (like the rape camps and the jails full of children) to begin with.

Except for Hans Blix, apparently.

[SpoofyChop]

Good points Rywill!

Although I basically don't give a shit whether "The American People" wanted to go to war or not.

I wanted to go to war!

Hehe...I kid. Actually, I don't care because "The American People" aren't the commander in chief and they don't have access to the information he has access to.

I think of it this way. There were basically about 10 incredibly compelling reasons to go to war. One of them was the possibility of WMD and other weapons that could potentially have been used by terrorists aided by Saddam.

This is the angle that the administration spent the most time publicizing, but even if it turns out that the WMD threat was less than thought or even that Saddam destroyed all his WMD on the Wednesday before the war started and we never find them, that still doesn't invalidate the 9 other incredibly good reasons to invade and liberate Iraq.

Now, as I said, if it would turn out that there was absolutely no evidence of WMD and all the evidence presented was simply manufactured, then you would certainly have a huge scandal that would rock the presidency as much as Watergate in all likelihood.

But I just don't think that's likely. You may continue to doubt if you want though!

Also...even if that were the case, I would still be happy that we liberated Iraq...not only for the Iraqis, but so that free people everywhere can enjoy their Honey Nut Cheerios at night without having to worry that their skim milk has Iraqi anthrax in it.

[Rywill]

Also...even if that were the case, I would still be happy that we liberated Iraq...not only for the Iraqis, but so that free people everywhere can enjoy their Honey Nut Cheerios at night without having to worry that their skim milk has Iraqi anthrax in it.
Sure, me too. I think the human rights violations were enough reason to go to war, so I'm glad we went and will remain glad we went even if it turns out there were no WMD at all. But if Bush lied about what reasons there were to go, that's still bad and a very big deal.

[Alan Dunkin]

There's more than enough to reason that WMD still exist, though the quantities were probably way exaggerated.

As for a threat to others.. one could still make the case that this was so. Remember Iraq threatened US citizens every day of the fucking week by attempting to shoot down US and British aircraft in the no-fly zones -- an act of war in of itself. A weak argument to be sure, but still very viable.

I've been hearing for a month or so that the Administration wanted to serve the war as an abject lesson to the rest of the arab nations not to fuck, directly or indirectly, with the United States. I think several of them got that message. The way we used that method (the method is very direct and rightly so, a far cry from the Clinton method of sending a dozen cruise missiles and calling it a victory) was simply stupid -- I'm no Bush fan, and I was very much for the war, mostly because it needed to be done, period.

Taking care of business.

There's no doubt that Bush and his cronies have taken a lot of political damage abroad because of this, not to mention here in the US. If they don't find a nice amount of WMDs soon, Bush will have a really hard time getting re-elected. I wouldn't vote for him anyway, unless Lieberman was the leading Democrat ticket.

Ah shit that'd be a terrible day.

--- Alan

[XPav]

Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and someone that supported the war, has an article up.

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/columnists/mark_bowden/5937888.htm


I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.

It suggests a strain of zealotry in this White House that regards the question of war as just another political debate. It isn't. More than 100 fine Americans were killed in this conflict, dozens of British soldiers, and many thousands of Iraqis. Nobody gets killed or maimed in Capitol Hill maneuvers over spending plans, or battles over federal court appointments. War is a special case. It is the most serious step a nation can take, and it deserves the highest measure of seriousness and integrity.

When a president lies or exaggerates in making an argument for war, when he spins the facts to sell his case, he betrays his public trust, and he diminishes the credibility of his office and our country. We are at war. What we lost in this may yet end up being far more important than what we gained.

[Erik Andersson]

They used lies and half truths to market the war and anyone is surprised? I don't care so much about the reasons behind the war, what I would like to see is a real interest in rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq. That would be a pleasant surprise.

[Captain Cookiepants]

Oh I'm sorry, I thought we found 14 of those trailers that we pinpointed with sattalites and they all were set up to be used as portable bio and chemical weapons factories which tests indicate that that is exactly what was in there.
You want absolute proof that we've found what we were looking for: when's the last time the actual news, and not just a columnist, reported that 'Nothing has been found was the war justified?'? Not for months.
Then again you know those jews and their manipulation of the media.

[Daniel Morris]

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral crisis, maintain neutrality."

-St. Thomas Aquinas

[XPav]

Oh I'm sorry, I thought we found 14 of those trailers that we pinpointed with sattalites and they all were set up to be used as portable bio and chemical weapons factories which tests indicate that that is exactly what was in there.
Err maybe not.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2083760/


Much has been made this week of two trailers, found in northern Iraq near Mosul, that the CIA says are "mobile biological-weapon production plants." In a May 28 report, considered so significant that the administration released it to the public, the agency goes so far as to call the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological-warfare program."

The report notes that the trailers contain a fermenter, water-supply tanks, an air compressor, a water-chiller, a device for collecting exhaust gases?just the right components for an "ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system." The trailers are also "strikingly similar" to descriptions of mobile-bioweapons plants provided by Iraqi exiles who claim to have worked in them or witnessed others who did. Secretary of State Colin Powell displayed drawings, based on these descriptions, during his Feb. 5 "smoking-gun" briefing to the U.N. Security Council.

Read closely, though, the CIA report reveals considerable ambiguity about the nature of these vehicles. For example, it notes that Iraqi officials?presumably those currently being interrogated?say the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather-balloons. (Many Army units float balloons to monitor the accuracy of artillery fire.) In response to this claim, the report states:

Some of the features of the trailer?a gas-collection system and the presence of caustic?are consistent with both bioproduction and hydrogen production. The plant's design possibly could be used to produce hydrogen using a chemical reaction, but it would be inefficient. The capacity of this trailer is larger than the typical units for hydrogen production for weather balloons.

One could ask: Since when was Saddam's Iraq considered a model of efficiency?

The report concedes that U.S. officials found no traces of any bioweapons agent inside the trailers. "We suspect," it states, "that the Iraqis thoroughly decontaminated the vehicle to remove evidence." That's possible.

The report also notes that, in order to produce biological weapons, each trailer would have to be accompanied by a second and possibly a third trailer, specially designed to grow, process, sterilize, and dry the bacteria. Such trailers would "have equipment such as mixing tanks, centrifuges, and spray dryers"?none of which were spotted in the trailers that were found. The problem, the CIA acknowledges, is that "we have not yet found" these post-production trailers. Question: Is it that they haven't been found?or that they don't exist?


You want absolute proof that we've found what we were looking for: when's the last time the actual news, and not just a columnist, reported that 'Nothing has been found was the war justified?'? Not for months.
Then again you know those jews and their manipulation of the media.I'm thinking that "news" is supposed to report facts. The fact is no WMDs have been discovered yet. Any criticism or support of Bush's actions is an opinion.

[DrCrypt]

Then where is it? Why is that one Iraqi general saying that Saddam destroyed it all in the mid-90s? Why are a torrent of CIA leaks coming out that they were pressured to make up evidence? Why is the right suddenly so disaparging towards the WMD justifications they were using just two months ago?
I dunno about the "right", which you always use as if it is some sort of cohesive political movement with the same immediately identifiable and morally repugnant end goal as, say, S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

I know that I haven't read anything though from people that supported the war that disparaged the evidence for WMD, though. People who believed in the war tended to believe in it because of both WMD and the shocking human rights abuses in Iraq. The latter has been proven to be worse than anyone imagined, which already justifies it for most people. The former have not as of writing been broadcast on CNN, but, as I said before, unless you believe that Iraq just lost the paper trail for destroying a hundred chemical warheads and forgot where they'd thrown them out, it is hard to believe that the Iraqi WMD drama unfolding for the last ten years has just been a wacky mistake. The UN's request was unambiguous; Iraq never complied. So most people think that the stash will be found, espectially considering it is a relatively small stash (Pollack says probably something less than a hundred missiles) in a huge country and consequently not easy to find. I'm one of them.

By the way, way to make naivete into an almost beatific quality with your sheepish assertion that an Iraqi general's word on the existence of WMD is, say, any more or less trustworthy than the Iraqi general's word on whether or not the Americans have taken Saddam International Airport.


Except for Hans Blix, apparently.
Nice lie here, Jason. You know damn well Blix never said that he believed Iraq didn't have WMD... in fact, he stated over and over again that Iraq wasn't complying with UN resolutions and hadn't proven jack shit as to their destruction, as it was incumbent upon them according to the resolutions to do. What he did say was that we should allow more time for inspections to work. Is this the sort of complete revisionism we can continue to expect from your enlightened mind?

[Jason McCullough]

Uh, he did? My apologies then, I thought he said they had disarmed. I mostly tuned the UN stuff ought, thinking it a pointless exercise.


I know that I haven't read anything though from people that supported the war that disparaged the evidence for WMD, though.

*What* evidence? All I've heard about is the trucks, of which the status is still up in the air; regraldess, note how the justification for the war has gone from "a mushroom cloud" to "WMD" to "biological weapons." No one who knows anything about the subject gives a shit about them; nukes were the threat to national security, remember? We haven't found any evidence of a bomb project, and a few noteworthy examples presented by Bush for such have turned out to be complete horseshit, such as the forged Nigerian uranium deal.


By the way, way to make naivete into an almost beatific quality with your sheepish assertion that an Iraqi general's word on the existence of WMD is, say, any more or less trustworthy than the Iraqi general's word on whether or not the Americans have taken Saddam International Airport.

Maybe you should calm the fuck down; I didn't accuse you of being dishonest when there was a more reasonable interpretation available. Namely, that even though he's an unreliable source, it's an interesting line of inquiry, isn't it?

Anyway, what I haven't seen is an explanation for Pollack as to why it's taking so long. CIA going apeshit with furious backpedaling and ass-covering doesn't look like an encouraging development.

[DrCrypt]

I know that I haven't read anything though from people that supported the war that disparaged the evidence for WMD, though.

*What* evidence?

Sorry, I phrased that very poorly. What I meant was, "I haven't read anything from people who supported the war that disparaged the need for evidence to be presented about the existence of WMD." Not to say there aren't those people who feel otherwise, but I think they are as much of lunatics as you probably do. Obviously, we need to know whether or not the WMD existed. Although the human rights abuses justify the war for me now (along with the incredibly smooth military operation), I doubt I ever would have felt Iraq was necessary to invade to begin with if there wasn't so much compelling evidence from people like Pollack about WMD.

So WMD is very important, and I do find the lack of discoveries a bit disconcerting. I just still find it a smaller leap of faith to believe that our inability to find a small amount of warheads in a huge country within a couple of months does not mean they don't exist, than to believe that the Iraqis destroyed them a decade ago but couldn't prove it.

[Jason McCullough]

Ah, ok. Big players are really soft-pedaling the need for WMD evidence now, though; Wolfowitz and Perle talking about how "WMD was one of many arguments", making disparging noises towards the entire concept of worrying about whether we find any, whatever. If I knew for sure it'd all turn out for the best, hey great, it was a good idea we invaded strictly on human rights grounds, but we don't know that invading Iraq won't end up being a massive fuckup. Who knows.

I don't know what the hell actually is the truth of there, but every day where all we've found is a few ambiguous trucks is a day I suspect more that Bush was doing a Kennedy/LBJ/Nixon on Vietnam-style act of "lies to children" about the public on Iraq.

It's apparently not going to have shit for effect domestically, but NPR had a clip of Blair getting seriously defensive today.

[Idar Thorvaldsen]

Slight shadow? It's beginning to look like the casus belli was a flat-out lie. Britain's really starting to look into things, with full parliamentary inquiries on what Tony Blair presented to both the house and the public at large. Judging by the way the heat is being ratcheted up there, it seems likely that Labour will turf Blair at some point in the near future.

With the Conservatives leading the charge, of course, even though they were for the war. This might be their only chance of getting rid of Blair in a while, them being in the state they're in. He might still pull through, he has a tendency of doing that, but this hasn't been good for him.

Anyway, is the US going to invade southern Turkey next, to help out the rest of the Kurds, or keep selling the Turks guns?


Hehe...I kid. Actually, I don't care because "The American People" aren't the commander in chief and they don't have access to the information he has access to.
Is that a prevailing mentality over were you live or anything? Because I was reading up on the history of Rome last night, and now you'll be giving me nightmares.

[Jason McCullough]

The ever-wonderful Daniel Davies has a hilarious bit (http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/) up:


One is a suggestion for some enterprising news media organization; The Independent appears to be going in for silly stunts like this instead of writing proper headlines. What I'd like to have is some kind of visual clue as to what the physical size of 25,000 litres of anthrax is; perhaps somebody could go down to a Sainsbury's depot and take a photograph of 12,500 two litre bottles of Coca-Cola or something. As far as I'm aware, a one metre cube is 1,000,000 cubic centimetres (100x100x100) and a litre is 1000cc. So you can fit 25,000 litres of anthrax into 25 cubes one metre on each side. A London bus is (I guesstimate) four metres high by three metres wide by ten metres long, which is 120 metre cubes. So, based on a calculation which took me precisely five minutes (three of which were spent asking people how many cc there were in a litre), I estimate that Saddam was alleged to have roughly a fifth of a Routemaster full of anthrax; say the size of a largish minivan. That's quite a lot of stuff to hide from spy satellites which can read number plates, even in a country "the size of France" [c]. I suppose in principle they could have handed a beer can full of anthrax to everyone in a football stadium, but then this would hardly have been "ready to use within 45 minutes".


For reference, I went on holiday to France last year, staying in a rented villa outside Biarritz that was roughly the size of three Routemaster buses. Based on "intelligence reports" established by phoning the proprietor ahead of time, I managed to find it in a mere six hours despite the fact that my key "source" was unreliable on a number of important points, such as which exit from the fucking autoroute he was near. Granted, the target was considerably bigger than the anthrax stash, but there's only one of me and besides, I doubt that the inspectors have to make stops to cheer up a screaming baby. The point I am trying to make is that, after a mere four of these six hours, Mrs. Digest was loudly denouncing my abilities and, specifically, strongly suggesting that I'd never actually phoned the bloke like I said I was going to and was making it up as I went along. If I'd raised the objection that "you can't expect me to find such a comparatively small and easily concealed object immediately in a country the size of France", I daresay I might not be alive today.


If it was six weeks later and we were still motoring round the Pyrenees aimlessly keeping an eye out for anything looking likely and all we'd turned up was a recently disinfected public toilet that sort of looked like it might have been rented out to foreigners once, I think any divorce court in the land would have taken it as read that my claim to have "solid information" about our holiday home was an outright lie. As I've said before, if you try to analogise these great matters of state to your daily life, it makes it a lot easier to work out whether what you're being asked to believe is credible or not. I want my 25,000 litres of anthrax right now, served a la Basquaise, or I want my Prime Minister's resignation for having misled the House of Commons1. It was a specific claim and it has to be backed up specifically or not at all. In other words, I am unlikely to look favourably on any candidate causus belli which contains fewer actual toxic germs than my breadbin.

[Daniel Morris]

My apologies then, I thought he said they had disarmed. I mostly tuned the UN stuff out, thinking it a pointless exercise.

No worries; it's the kind of standard confabulation I've come to expect. At least you can admit you've tuned out large swathes of the debate.

The "pointless exercise" is reading people like Davies, whose contribution to the WMD debate is Seinfeld-esque schtick.

[Jason McCullough]

Do I accuse you of rank dishonesty? Jesus.

[SpoofyChop]

Is that a prevailing mentality over were you live or anything? Because I was reading up on the history of Rome last night, and now you'll be giving me nightmares.

Happy to be of service!

:twisted:

[Daniel Morris]

Do I accuse you of rank dishonesty? Jesus.

Not dishonesty --- confabulation.

"the replacement of a gap in a person's memory by a falsification that he or she believes to be true."

You offer up "facts" like the one about Blix, because you're not really clear on the facts and basically think it should be true and therefore it is, as far as you're concerned. So you write it.

For another classic example of this, refer back to Tom Chick's "NATO intervention in Kosovo" thread.

[SpoofyChop]

I'm with Daniel...I think you may have confabulated, Jason. It would explain so much!

:D

[EDIT: Added a comma.]

[Jason McCullough]

What-ever.

[TimElhajj]

Was the risk Iraq posed to the US also confabulation? Because I seem to remember a huge amount of people on this board going on and on about the threat Iraq posed to the US.

[XPav]

Maybe Saddam possesed Weapons of Mass Confabulation and used them on the Bush administration.

[TimElhajj]

funny!

[SpoofyChop]

Maybe Saddam possesed Weapons of Mass Confabulation and used them on the Bush administration.

Tee-hee!

[voltaic]

If confabulation is wrong, then I don't want to be right! :lol: :lol: :lol:

[Daniel Morris]

Thomas Friedman has it 100% right. Read and absorb.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/04/opinion/04FRIE.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20O p%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists

[XPav]

The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world.

Taking the country to war for non-stated reasons. I have problems with that.


Mr. Bush took the country into his war. And if it turns out that he fabricated the evidence for his war (which I wouldn't conclude yet), that would badly damage America and be a very serious matter.

Yup.

[SpoofyChop]

Hey! Didn't you ding-dongs get the memo? The NYT's editors resigned today and the NYT is an untrustworthy one sided rag.

Also...here's my version of an NYT story:

"If it turns out to be true that Jason is a mysogynist Alien from the planet Penistacck then that would be a very bad thing."

[Rywill]

Good article. I agree with it pretty much 100%.

[Mark Asher]

Bush said Saddam was a threat because of WMDs. I want Bush to back up his words. I don't want the U.S. going to war over false pretenses. If they didn't really have WMDs, Bush should have sold the war on the merits of deposing Saddam.

War is serious business and that's the last thing our President should lie to us about.

[Cleve Blakemore]

Oh, it matters, too!

(sound of two ton hydraulic door sliding into place)

(voice comes over loudspeaker)

Yes, this could be a very serious affair! You guys stay out there and be sure to keep me informed about how it all turns out. Remember you can always reach me on the self-powered EMP shielded field phone in the air exhaust coupling just outside the vault door. I'll be itching to find out if this stuff was significant in the months leading up to World War III, definitely.

Please drag your crushed charbroiled, flying glass pincushioned asses over to the phone when you get a chance after the natural consequences of this sort of thing work themselves out and we'll chat. Be sure to give me a ring before your rad count gets over 200.

[XPav]

Oh, it matters, too!

(sound of two ton hydraulic door sliding into place)

What is this, an Alpha Centauri cut scene?

[ydejin]

Here's a quote from a summary page of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency report on Iraq's WMD written last September. This quote has been confirmed by a variety of sources including the White House:


there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has -- or will establish -- its chemical warfare agent production facilities

I originally saw this quote on the Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-060603intel_lat,1,5555911.story?coll=la-home-headlines) website.

At the start of the war I figured he probably had WMD here is part of one of my posts:


Well personally I think there's a 60-70% chance he's got them. At absolute minimum he's got to have more minor stuff like the empty chemical warheads previously found.

but now I'm starting to wonder if the administration was just completely making stuff up. From the way the administration was talking before the war, it was like Iraq had a large amount of WMD and was a direct threat to the United States. Now it's starting to look like if Iraq had any capabilities, it was pretty few and far between and from this report it looks like the administration knew that. If Bush didn't lie directly to us, he sure as hell shaded things a lot.

[ydejin]

Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, September (source Los Angeles Times) (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-060603intel_lat,1,5555911.story?coll=la-home-headlines) accuracy of quote has been confirmed by White House:


there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has -- or will establish -- its chemical warfare agent production facilities.

Rumsfield, September 18, House Armed Services Committee:


[Saddam's] regime has chemical and biological weapons. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons — including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas.

Cheney, August 26, Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention:


There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.

Source of Rumsfield and Cheney Quotes MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.com/news/923165.asp?0cv=CA01).

Someone either (a) didn't do their homework, or (b) refuses to believe their own intelligence services, or (c) deliberately lied to the American people.

[Jason McCullough]

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/trall/2003/trall030519.gif (http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom/2003/05/19/)

[TimElhajj]

You're saying that Bush lied about Iraq having WMD? You mean Pollack's book, which seemed so convincing only 4 months ago, was really incorrect, inaccurate?

You mean Iraq really wasn't much of a threat to the US...

Wow!

Who would have thought so many people could have been so completely fooled!

[Rywill]

You're saying that Bush lied about Iraq having WMD? You mean Pollack's book, which seemed so convincing only 4 months ago, was really incorrect, inaccurate?

You mean Iraq really wasn't much of a threat to the US...

Wow!

Who would have thought so many people could have been so completely fooled!

As several folks have noted above, that's not really the issue, Tim. Bush may have lied about WMD, and that's bad. That doesn't mean Saddam was less of a threat to the region due to his desire to acquire nukes, nor does it mean that he was any less of a monster. In other words, WMD or no WMD, invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Also, Pollack's argument (which I guess you haven't read) is unaffected by this, since the presence of WMD in Iraq is nearly irrelevant as far as he's concerned.

If Bush lied about WMD, it's a big deal not because we went to war when we shouldn't have, but because the president lied to try and convince more people that going to war was right.

[XPav]

Also, Pollack's argument (which I guess you haven't read) is unaffected by this, since the presence of WMD in Iraq is nearly irrelevant as far as he's concerned.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2079611/


Writers on The Storm: Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, responds to Chris Suellentrop's Assessment here. Pollack sees U.S. foreign policy caught between the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, "given how far down the road the Bush Administration has taken us, I think that we have no realistic choice but to go to war this year." And yet


I think the Administration has handled the diplomacy and public diplomacy of coalition building very poorly, and I am deeply concerned about the impact this will have both on postwar reconstruction and on our ability to garner allies for the inevitable next crisis.

Personally, he is clearly tired of "[h]aving had my name tossed around so often by so many who seem to have read only the subtitle of my book" and seems to concur with Suellentrop that "A more appropriate subtitle for the book would have been The Case for Rebuilding Afghanistan, Destroying al-Qaida, Setting Israel and Palestine on the Road to Peace, and Then, a Year or Two Down the Road After Some Diplomacy, Invading Iraq," when he says The Case for Invading Iraq "was not my choice!" .

edit: removed a bad quote...

[Jason McCullough]

That doesn't mean Saddam was less of a threat to the region due to his desire to acquire nukes, nor does it mean that he was any less of a monster.

If as of the invasion he didn't have jack for a nuke program (what it's looking like), I find it extremely hard to justify the whole thing on the off chance he'll get one at some indefinite point in the future.

[TimElhajj]

That doesn't mean Saddam was less of a threat to the region due to his desire to acquire nukes,

If there really are no nukes, I fail to see how his regime could have been a threat to the US. If a simple desire for nukes is now the threat litmus, then we should feel threatened all around.


nor does it mean that he was any less of a monster.

Agreed.


In other words, WMD or no WMD, invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

While my biggest problem with the invasion of Iraq was the huge campaign of seeming disinformation used to justify the attack, I still think your statement above goes to far. I would have liked seeing the US spend more time building world support for the war.


Also, Pollack's argument (which I guess you haven't read) is unaffected by this, since the presence of WMD in Iraq is nearly irrelevant as far as he's concerned.

humm. I did not read all of it, but I thought a huge part of his premise was that we could not allow Iraq to become a nuclear power because Saddam was too unpredictable.


If Bush lied about WMD, it's a big deal not because we went to war when we shouldn't have, but because the president lied to try and convince more people that going to war was right.

Completely agree with this and I enjoyed your earlier post in this thread. I didn't mention earlier becasue I am out of town and only checking the group occasionally.

[Rywill]

[Stuff about Ken Pollack]
I don't want to turn this into a "What Would Ken Pollack Do?" debate, but I think the stuff you're quoting misses the point. Pollack has always been clear (even in his book) that he thinks we shouldn't invade Iraq without world support, and that the Israel/Palestine conflict needed to be cooled off first. As it happens, I think he was mistaken--I think it would have been better for those things to happen (and I particularly blame Bush for losing world support), but it wasn't necessary for them to happen. All in all, I still think it was smarter to go into Iraq while we had American support (which was all we really needed), rather than waiting a year or two trying to build world support and potentially losing American support in the meantime.

None of that, though, has anything to do with whether Iraq currently has WMD or a functioning nuclear program. Did Pollack think Iraq did have WMD (chem/bio) and a functioning nuke program? He sure did, and I thought (and still think) his evidence and reasoning were pretty convincing. I'm surprised nothing has been found. I do think stuff will turn up, if only because I don't understand why Saddam would have done the things he did if he really had no WMD or WMD programs. But in any event, Pollack thought (and I thought, based primarily on Pollack's evidence, which I still believe) that Saddam intended to acquire nukes as soon as he could; that "as soon as he could" would be 3-5 years even if sanctions remained in place; and that once he got them, everything would go to shit. Thus, whether Iraq currently has bioweapons, chemical weapons, or a functioning nuclear program, doesn't matter that much, because there's good reason to believe that Saddam was trying to get a nuke program going and would in fact be able to eventually get nukes.

On Tim's point, as I've said before, I think there's a unique set of circumstances in Iraq that made invasion the right decision there. If I thought North Korea, for example, would be as much of a threat to the world economy as a nuclearized Iraq, and if I thought an invasion would be as painless as I thought an Iraq invasion would be, I would be in favor of invading North Korea if they didn't back off. But I don't think those things are true.

[XPav]

I think what I'm trying to say is "don't take Pollack's name in vain!" :lol: While you are, of course, free to take his evidence and use it to support your point of view, its obvious that Bush's plan for Iraq wasn't Pollack's plan for Iraq, and statement by the author have made it clear that he doesn't think the Bush action was the right way to do it.

In short, while Pollack thinks that the US was justified in taking out Saddam, the way we went about it will end up biting us on the ass.

And hindsight... http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/6032355.htm

But on Iraq's suspected nuclear-weapons development, which for him (Pollack) and other analysts was the most alarming program, "we've clearly uncovered nothing" so far, he said.

[Jason McCullough]

Thus, whether Iraq currently has bioweapons, chemical weapons, or a functioning nuclear program, doesn't matter that much, because there's good reason to believe that Saddam was trying to get a nuke program going and would in fact be able to eventually get nukes.

I don't know about you, but when it turns out everyone who should have known, and I do mean everyone, was completely wrong about the former, maybe there's something odd about the latter.

[Jason McCullough]

Well, will you look at this (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/07/international/worldspecial/07TRAI.html):


Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use


Now, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the administration's conclusions in what appears to be a bitter debate within the intelligence community. Skeptics said their initial judgments of a weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to light.


The skeptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production, peaceful or otherwise. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons.

Second, if this shortcoming were somehow circumvented, each unit would still produce only a relatively small amount of germ-laden liquid, which would have to undergo further processing at some other factory unit to make it concentrated and prepare it for use as a weapon.

Finally, they said, the trailers have no easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank.


William C. Patrick III, a senior official in the germ warfare program that Washington renounced in 1969, said the lack of steam sterilization had caused him to question the germ-plant theory that he had once tentatively endorsed. "That's a huge minus," he said. "I don't see how you can clean those tanks chemically."

Looks like there's going to be a lot more arguing, but people who know what they're talking about are divided on 'em.