All talk and no action. That's why Saddam had no problems going into Kuwait - he was absolutly sure the U.S. wouldn't do anything because, in his opinion, as soon as American soldiers were killed the country would lose it's stomach for war and the U.S. would pull out. Actually, he was absolutely sure the U.S. wouldn't do anything because he basically asked beforehand and we implicitly said we wouldn't do anything about it.
I just love these arguements, they can go on forever! Neither side will ever be satisfied with any amount of news. Each one will continue to slant it their direction to try and prove a point. Instead of thinking logically, they will say whatever they can to demonize the one side and make theirs look right. But I will continue to read what you have to say, cause some of the ridiculous comments/defenses are comical. keep it up.
Major, I have heard this a few places, but not sure if it is fact, or whether it is simply an Urban legend type thing. Can you back up this claim? DD
I think this is something that has been totally exagerated. First off, I think you are referring to some low-level diplomat saying we weren't interested in border issues. True. We probably weren't. But that's a completely different thing from invading another country, raping and pillaging its populace and then setting up your army in a way that's a threat the the NEXT nation over. Iraq claimed that it invaded Kuwait because Kuwait was cross-drilling into Iraqi territory. If they had stopped at the oil fields on the border a completly different scenario would likely have emerged. But, the cross-drilling complaint was simply Iraq's excuse to go into Kuwait. They were really pissed off at Kuwait and Saudi Arabia because they wouldn't forgive Iraq's debts incurred during it's war with Iran nor would they vote to raise oil prices to help Iraq make some badly needed cash. From the HindustanTimes To bring this post more "on topic" Saddam has been quoted as saying the biggest mistake he made was invading Kuwait before he had a nuke. Because if he had, nobody could have stopped him. From an article by Kenneth M. Pollack: <i>Third, Iraqi defectors and other sources report that Mr. Hussein told aides after the war that his greatest mistake was to invade Kuwait before he had a nuclear weapon, because then the United States would never have dared to oppose him. </i> After Saddam invaded Kuwait he even said that he would sell oil to the U.S. at a "very good price" if they U.S. didn't interfere. Obvously the fact that we didn't take Saddam up on his offer plus the fact that we got NO special favors from Kuwait after the war calls into question the "war for oil" theory as well.
and the government has said repeatedly that this is not a smoking gun. it's just not. they've been very forthright in saying so. Madmax, is it your position that Bush and his administration has been sufficiently honest with regard to wmd and their existence as a reason to go to war?
MadMax, do you agree w/ the administration? What would your opinion be if the administration argued the opposite point?
A centrifuge is nothing. I could buy one of those. You wouldn't go to war over a centrifuge so you cannot justify the war just because you have found one. There has to be something more profound. I liken this to finding a test tube that was labeled with a radioactive label. Big whoop. You need the centrifuge to link to something. Otherwise it's useless. This guy is a possible link but he could have been making the whole story up so you still need some hard evidence linking an otherwise mundane centrifuge to a weapon of mass destruction. If that exists I'd be willing to believe. bUt you just can't assume.
Come on now. The guy BURIED it in his back yard for Saddam. Saddam signed a cease fire agreement and this was one of the items he agreed to destroy. He SAID he had none of this type of equipment left....he was lying....and he paid for it. DD
Major, I have heard this a few places, but not sure if it is fact, or whether it is simply an Urban legend type thing. Can you back up this claim? From what I understand, Iraq and Kuwait had some economic disputes, with Kuwait owing Iraq for something or other and not paying. Iraqi diplomats asked US diplomats how we would react to the use of force to recover those debts, and we essentially said that it's a matter between the two countries. In diplomat-language, that was essentially a "we'll stay out of it" response. How accurate the details are, I don't know. I don't remember the exact source, but it was legit - it wasn't just hearsay that I found.
Major, Amb. April Glesby told the Iraqis that the United States was not interested in border disputes, and the Iraqis wildly misinterpreted her message. Many like to claim that the United States government gave Iraq the green light to invade Kuwait, which is ridiculous.
Last time I checked the only time you BURY something is to HIDE it. Do say that is the same as just finding a beaker or testube is hilarious to say the least
This thread perfectly sums up the stupidity that drove me away from posting in this forum. A scientist says he was ordered to hide nuclear WMD components for use at a later date, and the hardcore Dumbocrats don't see any threat to free people. uuuugh...... I will go back to just reading about basketball- the level of stupidity from some people is far too much for me to handle.
...and the mountain of evidence continues to build against the extreme liberal left's baseless arguments... yet again they must resort to sarcasm and humor to divert attention from another instance in which they were proven to be dead wrong. What does it take for them to abandon their blind hatred of the United States Armed Forces and its leadership? Fortunately, voters everywhere recognize all of this. Remember, the burden of proof was on the Iraqi regime to account for previously-accounted for WMD. The burden was *not* on the US to find anything. We asked where the VX gas and serin gas was and they said they didn't know. That's simply not good enough. What the lunatic fringe liberals attempt to do is turn it into a silly game of hide-n-seek so that they can attempt to discredit the valiant efforts of our Armed Forces and its leadership. Disgusting.
If you want to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, one has to stop the education of physicists. Nothing else is going to work short of policing the planet, and we cannot even police Iraq. Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine and China are only too happy to get cash by selling thousands of brand new centrifuges to whomever has cash. Bush isn't serious about this, if he was, he would do something about Iran which is so more advanced than Iraq it's ridiculous. http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2003/ma03/ma03stober.html No Experience Necessary By Dan Stober The Nth Country experiment showed that three post-docs with no nuclear knowledge could design a working atom bomb. Thirty-nine years ago, in the dusty ranch town of Livermore, California, the U.S. government secretly chose three newly minted post-doc physicists, put them off in a corner of a laboratory with no access to classified information, and told them to design a nuclear weapon. What can the unsettling results of that experiment tell us about the likelihood that today’s Al Qaeda, or some other terrorist group, will build the bomb? In April 1964, only the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Britain were nuclear powers. The Cold War was on, and the arms control debates that began even before the Trinity test still raged. The chilling experience of the Cuban missile crisis was less than two years old. And there was fear in the air that nuclear weapons would spread to other, perhaps unexpected, countries. Britain had been the third country, France the fourth. Would China be the fifth? (It would, six months later.) Where would it end? Which would be the “Nth Country”? One list of potential proliferators contained the names of a staggering 26 countries, from Argentina to Yugoslavia.1 Even college students entered the public debate. Chris Hohenemser was a “19-year-old kid” when he testified before a congressional committee in the spring of 1958. The issue then was the international sharing of nuclear reactor technology, and he was against it. “It wasn’t going to serve the process of getting nuclear weapons under control,” he said recently. Much of the proliferation debate centered on industrial capabilities for enriching uranium or producing plutonium. But there was a second argument, one with a whiff of elitism and scientific arrogance. Were the scientists from a small, possibly Third World country, smart enough to design an atomic bomb? Or did it require an Oppenheimer? . . . Most of the world’s highly enriched uranium that terrorists might seek to procure is in the hands of weapons programs. Selden, who has worked with the Russians to safeguard their stores, says the terrorist problem is taken seriously there, but material security is still far from U.S. standards. Another potential source of highly enriched uranium is research reactors, where the metal is burned as fuel. Such reactors are scattered around the world. Anti-terrorism concerns prompted the U.S. government to cooperate last August in the emergency evacuation of 48 kilograms of reactor fuel flown safely from Belgrade to Russia. The dangers of nuclear terror have been obvious since the beginning of the atomic age. Edward U. Condon, having played a major role in the Manhattan Project, wrote in 1946: “In any room where a file case can be stored, in any district of a great city, near any key building or installation, a determined effort can secrete a bomb capable of killing a hundred thousand people and laying waste every ordinary structure within a mile.”15 Jay Davis, who headed the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency during the Clinton administration, and was earlier a U.N. inspector in Iraq, said there is general agreement in the nuclear community that terrorists can build a bomb. “A very small group of people could do that if they could get the material,” he said. During the Clinton administration, he tried unsuccessfully to convince the weapons labs to launch a new version of the Nth Country Experiment, this time asking whether terrorists could build the bomb. Bob Selden thinks he knows why no one was interested: He and Dave Dobson answered the question 39 years ago.
TJ makes a great point...even up to the invasion, Saddam couldn't account for stuff we knew he had in 1991. blix even said he was concealing stuff at that point....that he wasn't being forthright.
