But it clearly means that he has the potential to be vastly more informed, which he has repeatedly demonstrated with his substantive posts. A demonstration that is rarely manifested in the work of those such as yourself, SamFisher, Andy 'howlin at the' Moon and glynch.
Couldn't it well be that you're both dead wrong? Treeman, though I never agree with any opinion of yours, I'm glad to hear from you again. Don't disappear from the boards altogether.
Hmmm...Interesting. So the supposition from the pro-war crowd is that, due to being stationed guarding a depot ( in Japan, was it?), treeman is in possession of superior knowledge about the situation in Iraq.... How, then, do we reconcile that superior knowledge, irrespective of it's grounds, with contentions it has lead treeman to in the past, including, but not excluded to, the facts that the Iraqis had nukes, that it was quite likely that Saddam had distributed WMDs to front line commanders just before the war, that several WMD finds since were factual, that there was no pending guerilla war, but merely token resistence from former Saddam henchmen, including his favorite, the helium vans, which were " 99.9999.%...No, let's make that 100% " proven to be chemical weapon labs, and countless others? What sounds to the pro-war crowd as evidence of superior knowledge sounds to me not unlike someone parroting White House press releases ad infinitum. Something I have been wating to task tree is this: A while back you claimed that the resistance in Iraq was alsmost entirely Ba'athis Saddam supporters acting in their own interests, and went on to say that should the Shi'ites get involved, then we would be in trouble, and that would be a sign of a wide spread anti-American sentiment in Iraq. Now that you have, at least, faced reality enough to ackowledge that this is, in fact, a guerilla war, what about the Shi'ites? Fairly steadily, but especially since the Mosque incident, Shi'ite involvment in anti-US actions, protests, etc. has risen, and the head of the US forces in Iraq has ackowledged that the anti-US sentiment is not restricted to Saddam supporters, but includes elements from a cross section of the country, including Shi'ites. Is this enough to make you agree with your former statement about the ramifications of Shi'ite involvment? P.S. Congratulations, and get some rest. Newborns will wear you out, even as they delight you.
Good fortune on the coming family addition, treeman. Colin is a good name for a son. Powell pronounces his "wrong", but that's OK... he's entitled. If this is your first, man, is your life about to change. Glad you're back with your own take on the forest.
...and your military expertise is drawn from which of your life experiences? Reading Chaucer or Voltaire? What a joke.
Yawn. Read my sig and you too can be enlightened. Treeman's opinion about Saddam's whereabouts and his ellusive nuclear WMDs are really quite humorous.
Hello. Good to hear from you again Tree. Congrats. And you are excused for not writing regularly. If your life plays out like mine, we can look forward to many late-night posts in the near future as you draw the sit-up with baby duty. I hope all goes well. I hope you're right, but has any of those billions of dollars in cash showed up? Sadly, I would take that bet and if I have to ask you why in five years I would consider it our good fortune. The idea that we are drawing the terrorists out of the woodwork (the flypaper notion recently pushed by some neo-cons) is a flawed idea based on a static view of the situation... There is a fixed number of guys willing to kill us, they are the same people who would commit terrorists acts here, and everybody who's going on the Jihad is suited up and on the playing field. I don't see any of those assumptions being realistic. And before you say we'll win the guerilla war, perhaps you ought to define what that means... a happy, stable democracy in Iraq, a lack of American soldiers being killed, a placid but still resentful populace... what? Interestingly enough, the Kay report is leaking like the Bismarck. Here's a story from the Boston Globe today... _______________________ US says Iraq arms plan relied on deceit Report to describe dispersed programs By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/28/2003 WASHINGTON -- Investigators searching for Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction will report next month that Saddam Hussein's regime spread nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons plans and parts throughout the country to deceive the United Nations, according to senior Bush administration and intelligence officials. Once freed of inspections and international sanctions, the weapons programs were intended to be pulled together quickly to manufacture substantial quantities of deadly gases and germs, the investigators will argue, although the development of a nuclear weapon would probably take many months, if not years. After more than four months of searching hundreds of sites in Iraq, the team of US military officers and intelligence agents headed by former UN arms inspector David Kay has not produced hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction. US officials have not ruled out that stocks of weapons will still be found or were secreted out of the country before the war. But the investigators' conclusions, which have emerged from interviews with senior Bush administration officials and multiple intelligence sources with access to the team's findings, make the White House's best case so far that Hussein hid an outlawed weapons program. A primary justification for toppling the regime was the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The sources say Kay -- who has in the past hinted in general terms at Iraq's deception in hiding a weapons program -- will build a strong, but largely circumstantial case that Hussein dispersed his weapons programs. The case will be based on interviews with captured Iraqi leaders, documents from government files, discoveries including a pre-1991 nuclear centrifuge for enriching uranium found buried in a scientist's backyard garden, and components of possible weapons systems found in various areas of the country. But some former inspectors and weapons specialists say that unless the US team finds significant quantities of outlawed chemical and biological agents, the Bush administration's case would fall far short of expectations. They cited Bush's prewar assertions that Iraq maintained large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, making it an imminent threat to US security. Some observers also contend that finding that the Iraqi program had been disassembled could prove that international efforts to restrain the regime's weapons ambitions were working. (A report in today's Los Angeles Times says US and allied intelligence officials are conducting reviews to see whether they were deceived by Iraqi defectors feeding misinformation to the West in the lead-up to the war.) Officials said the investigators plan to paint a picture of an Iraqi government intent on expanding its ability to produce chemical and biological weapons and continuing its search for a nuclear bomb, while ensuring that the parts, if uncovered individually, would not be condemning or could be explained away as legitimate scientific and manufacturing endeavors. A key aspect of the case, the sources said, will be so-called "dual use" equipment designed for making, for example, pesticides, but also useful for producing chemical weapons. One senior administration official said Kay's 1,200-member Iraq Survey Group has uncovered a "highly dispersed program spread across Iraq that could quickly be turned into a sophisticated manufacturing program." "Kay is breaking the code," the official said on condition of anonymity. "The available intelligence on the state of the WMD program would fill buildings." Added one intelligence official with access to Kay's reports: "They had everything ready to go and were just working toward sanctions being lifted and could go right back to work." Kay is planning to make his case to Congress as early as mid-September, the officials said. But it remains unclear how much of his findings will be made public. Another intelligence official said Kay's previous public assertion that Iraq had a fine-tuned deception program to hide its weapons activities may not be cataloged in great detail out of concern of giving other would-be proliferators tips on how to hide their efforts. But the intelligence official, who has read Kay's progress reports said, "They're building the case." "It's based on a lot of things," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "What people have told them, a lot of documents, a lot of dual-use materials." A decentralized program that depended heavily on equipment that could be used for legitimate as well as illegal weapons purposes also could help explain the purposes of two tractor-trailer trucks found soon after the war that many intelligence officials concluded were mobile biological weapons laboratories, the officials said. In subsequent months, as no traces of outlawed materials were found in the trucks, some intelligence analysts have expressed the contradictory view that they were more likely intended for making hydrogen, which could be used in weather balloons. But "the trailers may be an example of a dispersed program and a program of deception that will be well documented," the intelligence official said. The Iraqis' so-called "break-out" program -- which could rely on small, dispersed teams of specialists and hidden equipment and supplies to build weapons of mass destruction in the event of relaxed scrutiny -- also could explain why the Republican Guard did not use chemical weapons against American troops in the war, as US commanders feared. Kay is expected to unveil evidence to support assertions by US officials before the war that Iraqi troops had been ordered to launch gas attacks on invading troops. But Kay's findings to date raise as many questions as they answer, according to former UN inspectors and weapons specialists. A primary question is whether such a program as described by officials constitutes the level of threat that Bush administration officials described to build support for invading Iraq, the specialists said. Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said the argument over going to combat "was whether the threat was so imminent and dangerous that we had to go to war. If Kay says there was potential there, that refutes the administration's rationale for going to war. No one ever argued there was nothing there. I still suspect we'll find remnants of the program, perhaps nerve or mustard gas or anthrax samples." But Cirincione and others said the potential to build weapons was a problem that "inspections could deal with," including the Bush administration's attempts in 2001 to tighten the Iraq sanctions to stop the flow of more dual-use equipment. Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector who is a major critic of the Bush administration, said resting the case heavily on dual-use equipment is not compelling because any modern state would have such equipment. "Iraq is a modern, industrial state, or was, that needs access to technology to survive. A lot of that technology is dual-use in nature. Why would it stun anyone to find out they have covertly procured a dual-use program? This isn't new." __________________ Now. I'm well aware that you and others will probably read this a different way, but to me it looks like the administration is preparing a document that totally discredits the immediacy of the threats we were told about before the war, but will dress this up in documents, tables, and a wealth of mostly irrelevent details in the hopes that there is enough there to hang a rhetorical defense of the actions and hope nobody notices that the whole thing does not add up. Good to have you back.
I don't see what great info treeman has provided. 1) Attacks are being carried out by Baathists and Saddam loyalists... errr check. Never would have guessed that. 2) Saddam is still alive... errr check. Again, didn't know that. 3) War coverage is negative yadda yadda people living without regular power, water, and getting killed in random attacks isn't negative... errr check. We have a blackout in NYC for one day and it's nearly the end of the world but in Iraq they don't have power for weeks at a time and even just recently had their whole grid up and it's not supposed to be viewed as negative. 4) We will win! rah rah check 5) WMD is there, Democrats suck. check Mysterious centrifuge buried before the first war means there is a secret nuclear plan... unsubstantiated conspiracy check. Hope you're doin well treeman, congrats on the baby.
Treeman's opinions in the last 6 months can be viewed from the same light??? Many of his opinions (as well as others in the military) have proven quite dellusional, like bio/chem WMD are 45 minutes away from use prior to war, bio/chem WMDs would be used against the US/UK invasion force, we are close to finding Iraq's WMD (and this time I mean it), the Iraqi would embrace the US/UK soldiers as their great liberators, Iraqi democracy would be smooth sailing, ad nauseum.
treeman didn't say that stuff wasn't negative-- just that the reporting was tilted. Are you vouching that news isn't tilted toward the negative?
Er, no, unless ( as possible) that is how you characterize post secondary educational institutions. I have studied/taught the following: *Military History. *International Relations. *Peace & Conflict Resolution. *various others arms of history which add light to the subject at and, including Near Middle East Studies, World Religions, Warfare and Diplomacy in the 20th Century, American History, etc. Nice try at another dismissal of facts not to your liking, T_J, but the joke you mentioned is on you.
You have just made almost all this stuff up for your own exaggerated purposes. They only legitimate points are that the US/UK soldiers were prepared for bio/chem weapons and that some/most Iraqis have embraced us as their liberators.
Was the news during the blackout negative despite all of the incredibly positive things going on that day? News in this country is negative. It's no different in Iraq than it is in your own home town. So?
MacBeth -- What a joke. Let's see, which carries more weight, reading a bunch of books about Hannibal's march over the Alps and Attila the Hun, or actually being in the military, seeing things first hand, and receiving education 20 hours a day on the job? While you can spout off about how many books you've read about the Crusades and Napoleon's battles, I really and truly do not see the relevance. Ivory Tower of Academia vs. Treeman's Actual Military Experience T-shirt, shorts and Birkenstocks vs. Full Combat Gear A *Canadian* Institution of Higher Learning vs. THE UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES You tell me who has the more informed opinion. But don't worry MacBeth, I'll certainly call you when I'm on Jeopardy and need to know how the battle of Antitem during the Civil War played out. What a joke.
Guess again. It was treeman that was making sh*t up. I am only reminding TJ of this, with specific examples. Carry on.
Lol! About what I expected. Thankfully those who are put in a position to dictate to the likes of treeman and analyze the situation in Iraq have had to study much of what you dismiss as irrelevent, while few if any have been required to guard a depot. I am not dismissing the honor and courage treeman is demonstrating, merely pointing out the difference of perspective on policy and situation evaluation. T_J, keep up the good work. As usual you argue against yourself better than I ever could have.
Thanks for the article rimrocker. I do look at it differently although I am looking forward to reviewing the proceedings and or documents he presents. Peace
