Yep. Was our intelligence bad? How could we have thought that Saddam had WMD? Don’t bother asking, it’s a moot point.
Sure, Saddam was a pig and we’ve found mass graves, but that’s not why I ask. If our intel was flawed on such a significant matter then, should we expect it to be any better now?
The “moot point” bit came from Andy Card today.. here’s the section it came from:
Guess that’s as close as you’ll get to an admission of error from these guys. There are no WMD, never were.
the only WMD in all this fiasco is bush's stupidity. its no less harmfull and dangerous than a WMD. :D
Sometimes the saying ignorence is bliss is very useful when you want an excuse to invade another country which has resources which you need and occupies a very strategic location. Once you have done the dasterdley deed its easy for you to brazen it out and talk about democracy, freedom and human rights. Also it helps when you have the media on your side and a public which believes Saddam was behind the WTC attacks.
well it's evident they won't discuss the faulty intelligence considering it came from a foreign nation with a vested interest in seeing Iraq dismantled.
Now it seems the Zionists were also telling bare faced lies…suprise, surprise.
Israeli intelligence overplayed the threat posed by Iraq and reinforced the U.S. and British assessment that Saddam Hussein had large amounts of weapons of mass destruction, a retired Israeli general said Thursday](Yahoo News: Latest and Breaking News, Headlines, Live Updates, and More)
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So, I think that's a moot point.
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You had people on this forum practically salivating subsequent to Powell's high-tech multimedia presentation @ the Security Council... in which he pointed out those obscure little rectangles and squares as evidence of Iraq's arsenal of WMD. Those were all "moot" points in retrospection, i guess. man what a farce. This admin gets stupider and stupider every minute.
Those 'sons of Blixes' were right all along, i guess.
I wonder if this means we can give up on National Missile Defense??
That should be a moot point by now too, huh?
It should never have been about WMD anyway. The dog and pony show at the UN was a misguided attempt to form a coalition on the only issue where Russia and France would not let their debts owed by Saddam over-ride their sense of propriety.
The WMD was a legitimate issue. After playing head games with the inspectors for years, (an entire nuclear program was only discovered after a defector squealed), who would trust what Saddam could have?
Personally, who cares? One genocidal dictator gone.
haha… “Who cares”? Ask Blix who cares, ask the thousands of people who endorsed this war solely based upon the potential WMD “threat”, who cares.
The millions of people who were misled and deceived do care. So do the team of UN inspectors who, i guess, were right all along. Some of us still care, genocidal dictator or not. If the dictator-argument was the principle upon which the invasion was based, then that should have been manifest from the beginning. But then stupid me 
i’m actually expecting honesty from the Bush admin.
People whose sons and daughters are fighting a war based on lies care.. If the President inovkes his powers in the wake of Clear and Imminent danger to the US, bypasses Congress and declares war and sends US sons and daughters in harms way.... he better not be lying..
Expect honesty also from France and Russia? They have been loaning money to Saddam since the 80's. Wanna crucify the US because they "backed" Saddam? Our support was minor compared to theirs. Very minor. That is why they would not have allowed the fall of this dictator based on his human rights record. As it should have been. A tyranical genocidal dictator would have remained in power so that France and Russia could get their Billions back.
So their are no WMD. Oooops.
I personally have no doubt that the moment sanctions were lifted Saddam would be busy reassembling his WMD capacity. Now we know that the threat was not "imminent", but neither was the threat to the US from Hitler. The danger, to us, and to the world was however predictable. I don't think ANYONE endoresed this war SOLEY on WMD. He was a megalomaniacal expansionist dictator who instigated at least two bloody wars and had designs on all of the Mideast. WMD was not the sole issue, WMD in the hands of a genocidal dictator certainly does have the smell of a large scale disaster.
Is there any doubt at all that Saddam committed genocide, killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims? That is what we should have gone to war over. Yet for all of the obvious nature of this, no tribunal was ever convened, no puplic outrage. Certainly none in the Muslim world. And you are worried about the accuracy of intelligence when you KNOW that Saddam has committed genocide? Priorities may be a little out of whack here...
o.G. I think ppl just question the timing of this stuff. the genocide took place ages ago, we had a chance to take him out during dester storm but backed off and that resulted in the killing of anti saddam forces among iraqis who thought they had some support.
and we supported him while he was a dictator oppressing ppl, maybe less than France and the Russians but we still did so.
Now the fact that he is gone is a whole diff topic. is he a damn mass murderer who needed to go, sure is. But that is not why we went after him, we went after him citing imminent threat from his weapns of mass destruction which can be launched within x hours. That has not been proven so far, could it be proven at some future pointin time..maybe. But until then people will question the validity of information and intelligence.
We did not go to afghanistan to liberatethe afghanis, since the taleban goons had been doing their monkey business for some time.. we went there because taleban would not give up al qaeda..and we know that these ppl were there. the fall of taleban was a by product...it was good but still a by product.
Iraq's case is a little different that the basic reason for attack has not been proven yet, yes I am all for saddam's removal and getting rid of the entire baath regime, which was an added bonus, but the main reason to attack has not been proven. There are those who will trust the leadership and will give them the benefit of teh doubt at thsi time as some evidence may turn up sometime, and there are those who will be skeptical of the lack of evidence.
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*Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
So their are no WMD. Oooops.
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And, so what, they killed 9000 innocent civilians, oops? Wonderful.
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Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
**So their are no WMD. Oooops.*
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The most democratic government on earth lied to millions and millions of people. Oooops. So thousands of innocent civilians were killed for a lie. Oooops. So Blix was accurate all along. Ooooops. So western, democratic governments lied to us. Oooops.
A whole list of ooooops there.
Blix was a pawn, a minor player. He had been fooled before, When he was the head of the IAEA and was going to certify that Iraq was free of an atomic weapons program just before a Saddams son in law reveal the program. His selection and crediblity problems added to the difficulty.
Fraudz, I am in agreement with most of what you say. The Desert Storm era was the ultimate in coalition morrass. Saddam should have been removed, the Shia's should have been helped. But there was no support in the Arab world for that, and no UN resolution for it.
If Saddam had not played games for nearly a decade, impeading the inspectors, hiding things whenever he could, and treating the inspections as a game, this all could have been over with much sooner.
Frankly, better late than never.
As far as "liberation", all the US can do is change the circumstances. It will ultimately be up to the Iraqi's and the Afghani's as to whether they will seize the moment, or slide back into tribal and ethnic war.
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
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Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
*[Blix] had been fooled before....**
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The only ones who have been fooled, are those naive and gullible individuals who actually believed that Iraq might possess "WMD".
But hey it's all a "moot point", now that the damage has been long done and the well-oiled democratic PR machines did a wonderful job.
I dont so much care about what's already happened.. what I care about is how this episode will influence our ability to handle actual threats in the future.
"The only ones who have been fooled, are those naive and gullible individuals who actually believed that Iraq might possess "WMD". "
Yes, because it's common sense that Saddam would never even consider such a thing. Give me a break!
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Originally posted by Stu: *
**Yes, because it's common sense that Saddam would never even consider such a thing. Give me a break!
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*
A lot of governments would "consider" it - Israel would, Turkey would, Saudi Arabia would. What are we talking about - the INTENT to possess WMD or the actual possession of such weapons? i guarantee you a heckuva lot of countries possess both the intent and the actual arsenal. Iraq may have had the intent [nothing new for most countries], but as Bush's cowboy government has humiliatingly learned, Iraq didn't possess the arsenal.
Give me a break.
because it's common sense that Saddam would never even consider such a thing
One of the commonest arguments about the use of force against megalomaniacs like Saddam is that when pushed to the wall they would attack their enemies with WMD's. Oddly this argument has never been proven, Hitler did not use Chemical weapons in WW2 against the Russians, nor did Saddam. Even in the case of Al Qaeda, most evidence of an interest in developing chemical agents was after Al Qaeda leaders heard how worried the American government was over a possible chemical weapon terrorist attack.
At the same time depleted Uranium and daisy cutters have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan with impunity.