For the sake of argument let's assume you we don't know. Is uncertainty the best reason to invade another country and have thousands of lives wiped out, and families devastated?
well, i won't start another arguement about what saddam was doing to his own people/country. suffice to say, no matter how horrible the experience of this war was to the average iraqi, it was still benign compared to the systematic murder, rape, and torture saddam visited on his own people. and by "i/we don't know, i mean we don't know now. we thought we knew then, and if we were wrong, all saddam had to do would've been to prove it, as he was required to do under UN res. 1441. he didn't, and that spoke volumes about his true intentions.
Duelfer the new chief inspector is not even looking for WMD stockpiles anymore... Arms Hunt In Iraq to Get New Focus By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, January 24, 2004 The departing chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday that he now believes Saddam Hussein did not stockpile forbidden weapons after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the incoming chief inspector indicated that he will shift the focus of the hunt from finding weapons to learning what became of Hussein's weapons programs. The CIA announced officially yesterday that Charles A. Duelfer, a former senior U.N. weapons inspector, will succeed David Kay, who is resigning after nine months of unsuccessful searches for banned weapons in Iraq. Duelfer, who as a private academic said the Bush administration's prewar allegations on Iraq's weapons were "far off the mark," said yesterday that his goal is to reconstruct Iraq's "game plan" for its weapons and weapons programs. Also yesterday, Kay said in an interview with the Reuters news agency that most of what will be found in the Iraq weapons search has already been found. Of the stockpiles alleged by the administration, "I don't think they existed," he said. "I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s." Kay could not be reached for further comment. The transition from Kay to Duelfer underscores a change in emphasis in the U.S. hunt for banned weapons. While Kay began his search with expectations of finding stockpiles, Duelfer has said the mission now is to discover when and how such stockpiles were eliminated. And while Kay emphasized physical searches for proof of weapons activity, Duelfer will rely on his previous relationships with Iraqi scientists from his days with the United Nations. White House aides, who consulted with CIA Director George J. Tenet on Duelfer's appointment, said they do not see the succession as a redirection of the search. And some in the Bush administration continue to believe that weapons might be found -- Vice President Cheney said this week that "it's going to take some additional considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes and ammo dumps." President Bush, however, has moved away from his previous assertions. In his State of the Union address this week, he referred not to weapons but to "weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities." Duelfer, in an op-ed article in The Washington Post in October, mentioned "the apparent absence of existing weapons stocks." Though he still considered Hussein as posing a potential, future threat in the production of weapons of mass destruction, he wrote that "clearly this is not the immediate threat many assumed before the war." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43180-2004Jan23.html?nav=hptop_ts
Unfortunately, Bassy boy, that's not what we were told...we we told about urgent danger and mushroom clouds. Quite obviously, no matter how much sand you have betwixt your cranium and reality, that just ain't the case any longer. What makes it even more disingenuous is t he fact that, the admin was not making a good faith mistake by feeding us this line of BS....rather, they had already decided to invade Iraq and were simply searching for political capital to do so, hence the whole WMD charade. Simply shameful; how many people did Clinton's lies kill? Now, how many innocents ("collateral damage") did Bush's lies kill? ( note, even if you wear a kaffiyeh or chador, you life still counts as one)
Really? "If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world. " Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary Press Briefing 12/2/2002 "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense Vanity Fair interview 5/28/2003 "I'm not sure that's the major reason we went to war." Bill Frist, Senate Majority Leader NBC, Today Show 6/26/2003 DIANE SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still — PRESIDENT BUSH: So what's the difference? George W. Bush, President Diane Sawyer Interviews President Bush. 12/16/2003
Yes we do. And we knew it before we invaded. If we were really worried about WMDs, don't you think it would be foolish to mass a bunch of troops on the Iraqi border and make one big target for one WMD? If we were really worried about WMDs, wouldn't have mnade that a priority in the immediacy of the invasion? Would we not have made it a priority to secure all the documents at the known center of the Iraqi effort (such as it was) before obligating troops to the Oil ministry and such?
I wasn't just talking about the Iraqi casualties and the Iraqi families that were devastated. I was definitely including the more than 500 U.S. deaths and their families who weren't in any danger from Iraq prior to the invasion and now are dead and have families thrown into needless tragedy. The other thousands of Iraqi's are still going through increased kidnapping, crim, and a large increase in the number of terrorists in their country now, as opposed to win Saddam was there. Women are having their rights revoked. I say that not because I think Iraq should have stayed under Saddam. I don't. But that doesn't mean that everyone there is happy and things are going well for them without Saddam. We've talked before and we both agree that most of this is probably part of the growing pains, but that doesn't mean there isn't tragedy etc invovled.
Rereading parts of this thread is like taking a boat ride down a river in Egypt. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&e=1&u=/nm/iraq_usa_dc Bush Backs Away from Iraq WMD Certainty By Steve Holland WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the wake of a top expert's conclusions that Iraq had no large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, President Bush on Tuesday dropped his previous certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the reason given for the U.S.-led invasion. The shift came as Bush met Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a close war ally, and as some of his top aides planned to meet a top U.N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, about a possible lead role for him in postwar Iraq. The conclusions from David Kay, who resigned last week as the chief U.S. weapons investigator in Iraq, raised questions about the quality of U.S. intelligence before the war and whether the Bush administration hyped it to justify its case for war against Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). It was likely to resonate on the campaign trail as Democrats seek to replace Bush. Bush, in his first comments on Kay's findings, did not rule out that unconventional weapons might be found in Iraq but neither did he repeat his earlier certainty that weapons would be found. He said the team of weapons searchers still there, called the Iraq Survey Group, was still looking. "First of all I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work so we can find out the facts, compare the facts to what was thought," Bush told reporters with Kwasniewski at his side in the Oval Office, a fire crackling behind them against the winter chill. Bush said last March in making the case against Iraq that "intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." He has since tempered that to say that he believed Iraq was pursuing weapons programs. "We acted in Iraq, where the former regime sponsored terror, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction, and for 12 years defied the clear demands of the United Nations Security Council," he said in a Sept. 7 speech. On Tuesday, he expressed "great confidence" in the U.S. intelligence community and said intelligence agencies around the world shared the same view that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons. JUST CAUSE Bush said that in any event, toppling Saddam was a just cause given his refusal to comply with U.N. demands in a post-Sept. 11, 2001, world. "There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a grave and gathering threat to America and the world," he said. "And I say that based upon intelligence that I saw prior to the decision to go into Iraq, and I say that based upon what I know today. And the world is better off without him." Kwasniewski, for his part, said that months before the war he met with Hans Blix, who served as the chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, and that Blix told him Iraq was ready to produce unconventional weapons if necessary to keep Saddam in power. Blix was unable to find the weapons. The White House believes Kay has helped the administration's case against Iraq. Kay told The New York Times Iraq attempted to revive its efforts to develop nuclear weapons in 2000 and 2001 and was actively working to produce biological weapons using the poison ricin until the U.S. invasion last March. Democrats want an independent probe to look at what went wrong with U.S. intelligence and whether the Bush administration manipulated it to justify an invasion. On postwar Iraq, the United States wants Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister who just finished a two-year stint as chief U.N. envoy in Afghanistan, to play a leading role in a U.N. effort to assess whether elections can be held in Iraq by mid-year. Brahimi, 70, now a senior adviser to Annan, has resisted going to Baghdad to lead the team and negotiate with Iraq's powerful Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who wants a full-scale election before the United States would prefer. Brahimi later in the day was to meet Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, Robert Blackwill, one of Rice's senior officials, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Bush administration officials said. Brahimi was at the White House last week for talks with Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell as well as Rice and Blackwill.
The new US strategy is to attack the character of anyone who calls for a critical discussion of the reasoning behind the war in Iraq. Good times...
