Iraq was never a threat to us, hell, using the pro-war logic, claiming that the war was a breeze with minimal casualties, Iraq wasn't even a threat to our soldiers on Iraqi soil itself.
No, Iraq was never a threat to us. We should allow nuclear and other WMD development/research to go unchecked. No government in their right mind would ever use them on the US of A, or allow them to fall into the hands of terrorists. Impeach Bush and get someone who REALLY understands the dangers of today's world and how to deal peacefully with them in the Oval office! Jesse Jackson in '04!!
Iraq's Real Weapons Threat by Rolf Ekeus Sunday, June 29, 2003; Page B07 THE HAGUE With no weapons of mass destruction as yet found in Iraq, the political criticism directed against President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair is mounting. Before the war, the two leaders publicly declared that the Iraqi regime had not only procured and produced such weapons but still retained them with the intention to use them. This was considered a good reason for a military operation against Iraq -- an outright casus belli. A United Nations inspection team, before the war, and the U.S. military, after the war, have been searching Iraq and have not come up with anything that can remotely be called weapons of mass destruction. Is it now time to join the game of blaming Bush and Blair for an illegitimate or illegal war? Let us first consider some facts in a complicated picture. Chemical weapons were used by Iraq in its war against Iran (1980-88). Arguably that use had a decisive effect on the outcome: It saved Iraq from being overwhelmed by a much larger Iranian army. Furthermore, Iraq made use of chemical bombs in air raids against the Kurdish civilian population in northern Iraq. Nerve gases, such as sarin, and mustard gas immediately and painfully killed many thousands of civilians. More than 100,000 later died or were crippled by the aftereffects. These reminders illustrate that Iraq's acquisition and use of chemical weapons were carried out in pursuit of two strategic goals, namely to halt Iran's possible expansion of its sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf region and to suppress internal opposition. The war started by Iraq in 1980 was directed against its historical enemy, Iran. In strategic terms and over generations, Iraq/Mesopotamia had been positioned as a gatekeeper of the Arab nation against repeated Persian expansion westward, a threat that had become acute with the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. All the emirates and states in the gulf region, ruled by Arabs of traditionalist Sunni Muslim orientation, considered Persian nationalism and expansionism a constant problem, especially after Iran's Shiite revolution. For Saddam Hussein, the self-styled, self-promoted defender of the Arab nation, "the Iranian beasts," to quote Tariq Aziz in a conversation with me -- not the United States or Israel -- were the eternal enemy of Iraq. With its population of more than 64 million, Iran constituted a challenge that Iraq, with its 24 million inhabitants, could not match with conventional military means. By using chemical weapons to gas and kill the "human waves" of young, poorly protected Iranian attack forces, the Iraqi army repeatedly saved itself from being overwhelmed. And thus it became conventional wisdom, nourished by the Iraqi leadership, that only nonconventional weapons could guarantee that Iraq would prevail in an armed conflict with Iran. Regarding biological weapons, the U.N. inspection team, UNSCOM, managed after four years of investigation to confirm the existence in Iraq of a major secret biological weapons program. This led in August 1995 to the defection from Iraq of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, director of Iraq's WMD programs. During UNSCOM's debriefings in Iraq after the defection, Iraqi biological weapons scientists, able to speak slightly more openly than normally, explained that their secret work mainly was on assignments to find means for warfare against the Iranians. Regarding the nuclear weapons projects, the Iraqi authorities defended their systematic violation of Iraq's obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with the proposition that Iran, likewise a party to the treaty, was active in developing its own nuclear weapons. Iraq's obsession with Iran was illustrated by its air attack in 1983 on the Iranian nuclear reactors at Busher. Even the quite remarkable missile developments in Iraq were related to Iran. Iraq succeeded in modifying and re-engineering many hundreds of the more than 800 Scud missiles bought from the Soviet Union -- increasing their range of 200-300 kilometers to 500-600 kilometers, sufficient to reach Tehran. In sum, all four components of Iraq's prohibited and secret WMD program were motivated and inspired by its structural enmity and rivalry with Iran. Thus, during the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq did not use its readily available chemical weapons, stored in considerable quantities in southern Iraq, against the U.S.-led forces. The Iraqi leadership made clear to me that there would have been no military sense in using chemical weapons on such a fast-developing battlefield, where the enemy was highly mobile, well trained and well equipped for chemical warfare. In addition, the Iraqi willingness to use chemical weapons had been tempered by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker's promise to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that such a contingency would change the U.S. war aim from the liberation of Kuwait to regime change in Iraq. The fact that Iraq in the recent war did not counter the coalition forces, now even better trained and equipped than last time, with chemical weapons should not have come as a surprise. The chemical weapons, like the other WMD, had been developed with another enemy in mind. But a big question remains about the puzzling absence of chemical weapons in Iraq. Detractors of Bush and Blair have tried to make political capital of the presumed discrepancy between the top-level assurances about Iraq's possession of chemical weapons (and other WMD) and the inability of invading forces to find such stocks. The criticism is a distortion and trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security. During its war against Iran, Iraq found that chemical warfare agents, especially nerve agents such as sarin, soman, tabun and later VX, deteriorated after just a couple of weeks' storage in drums or in filled chemical warfare munitions. The reason was that the Iraqi chemists, lacking access to high-quality laboratory and production equipment, were unable to make the agents pure enough. (UNSCOM found in 1991 that the large quantities of nerve agents discovered in storage in Iraq had lost most of their lethal property and were not suitable for warfare.) Thus the Iraqi policy after the Gulf War was to halt all production of warfare agents and to focus on design and engineering, with the purpose of activating production and shipping of warfare agents and munitions directly to the battlefield in the event of war. Many hundreds of chemical engineers and production and process engineers worked to develop nerve agents, especially VX, with the primary task being to stabilize the warfare agents in order to optimize a lasting lethal property. Such work could be blended into ordinary civilian production facilities and activities, e.g., for agricultural purposes, where batches of nerve agents could be produced during short interruptions of the production of ordinary chemicals. This combination of researchers, engineers, know-how, precursors, batch production techniques and testing is what constituted Iraq's chemical threat -- its chemical weapon. The rather bizarre political focus on the search for rusting drums and pieces of munitions containing low-quality chemicals has tended to distort the important question of WMD in Iraq and exposed the American and British administrations to unjustified criticism. [contd.]
[contd.] The real chemical warfare threat from Iraq has had two components. One has been the capability to bring potent chemical agents to the battlefield to be used against a poorly equipped and poorly trained enemy. The other is the chance that Iraqi chemical weapons specialists would sign up with terrorist networks such as al Qaeda -- with which they are likely to have far more affinity than do the unemployed Russian scientists the United States worries about. In this context the remnants of Iraq's biological weapons program, and specifically its now-unemployed specialists, constitute a potential threat of much the same magnitude. While biological weapons are not easily adapted for battlefield use, they are potentially the more devastating as a means for massive terrorist onslaught on civilian targets. As with chemical weapons, Iraq's policy on biological weapons was to develop and improve the quality of the warfare agents. It is possible that Iraq, in spite of its denials, retained some anthrax in storage. But it could be more problematic and dangerous if Iraq secretly maintained a research and development capability, as well as a production capability, run by the biologists involved in its earlier programs. Again, such a complete program would in itself constitute a more important biological weapon than some stored agents of doubtful quality. It is understandable that the U.N. inspectors and even more, the military search teams, have had difculty penetrating the sophisticated, well-rehearsedand protected WMD program in Iraq. The task was made infinitely more challenging by the fact that Iraq was, and indeed still is, a "republic of fear." Through my indirect contact with some senior Iraqi weapons scientists, I have been given to understand that the reign of terror is still in place. Outsiders who have not dealt with Iraq cannot easily understand the extent to which the terror of the Hussein years has penetrated that unhappy nation. As long as Hussein and his sons are not apprehended or proven dead, few if any of those involved in the weapons program will provide information on their activities. The risk of terrible revenge against oneself or one's family is simply too great. The first point on a WMD agenda must be to create a safe environment free from the remnants of terror. The chemical and biological warfare structures in Iraq constitute formidable international threats through potential links to international terrorism. Before the war these structures were also major threats against Iran and internally against Iraq's own Kurdish and Shiite populations, as well as Israel. The Iraqi nuclear weapons projects lacked access to fissile material but were advanced with regard to weapon design. Here again, competition with Iran was a driving factor. Iran, as a major beneficiary of the fall of Hussein, has now been given an excellent opportunity to rethink its own nuclear weapons program and its other WMD activities. The door is now open for diplomatic initiatives to remake the region into a WMD-free area and to shape a structure in the Persian Gulf of stability and security. Moreover, the defeat of the Hussein regime, a deadly opponent to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, has opened the door to a realistic and re-energized peace process in the Middle East. This is enough to justify the international military intervention undertaken by the United States and Britain. To accept the alternative -- letting Hussein remain in power with his chemical and biological weapons capability -- would have been to tolerate a continuing destabilizing arms race in the gulf, including future nuclearization of the region, threats to the world's energy supplies, leakage of WMD technology and expertise to terrorist networks, systematic sabotage of efforts to create and sustain a process of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the continued terrorizing of the Iraqi people. The writer was executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq from 1991 to 1997. A former Swedish ambassador to the United States, he is now chairman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43468-2003Jun27.html
The Politics of Mass Destruction By Richard Spertzel Wall Street Journal | June 27, 2003 Even as evidence is uncovered that Saddam Hussein was planning to revive his nuclear-weapons program at the earliest possible date, politicians and pundits alike lament the failure of coalition forces to find a "smoking gun." Despite the recent discovery of plans and parts for a uranium-enrichment centrifuge, some presidential candidates have accused the Bush administration of lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify the war with Iraq. Such assertions ignore all that has been learned and has transpired during the last 12-plus years. As I've said time and again, expecting any inspection regime to find a massive cache of WMDs is a lesson in self-delusion. Such folly can only bring cheer to those who opposed the war in the first place and to those who simply oppose the Bush administration. Recall that during the first Gulf War, Iraq stored its biological agent-filled munitions in pits dug in the sand or in abandoned railroad tunnels. Such sites are not easily found. Good intelligence emanating from those Iraqi personnel responsible for the deployment, protection and control of such storage sites will be required. Indeed, it was an Iraqi scientist who this week led coalition forces to the site where the uranium-enrichment equipment was buried. But many WMD personnel were part of the Special Security Organization under Saddam's younger son, Qusay. The information is not likely to be obtained easily. Some pundits question, if Iraq had WMDs, why did they not use them? Iraq learned from the first Gulf War that coalition forces headed by the U.S. could advance very rapidly. Iraq also indicated in testimony to the U.N. Special Commission, or Unscom, that biological weapons would have little effect in stopping an advancing military force. Rather, their interest was to use biological weapons to intimidate their neighbors and cause them to "see things Iraq's way." Thus its failure to use biological WMDs should not be a surprise to anyone. The failure to use chemical WMDs is also not surprising considering the apparent confusion within the Iraqi command structure during the race to Baghdad. Then, why have such weapons not been found? The answer may lie in the training and experience of the inspectors. The initial team looking for WMDs in Iraq was more reminiscent of site exploiters than inspectors. True, if they found a bomb or missile warhead, they were capable of further exploitation of the find to determine its contents. But they apparently did not have testing instruments capable of detecting trace-amounts of biological-weapons agents. The next iteration of the coalition inspectors was supposed to have a number of inspectors that had extensive experience in Iraq and has been so misrepresented in the media. I was asked in February to propose a list of Unscom experienced biological inspectors (a so-called A team) that had multiple inspection trips to Iraq. These were to be from the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. In March, after the concept was approved, I was asked to contact those on my list to assure they were willing and able to devote the time. All but one agreed to the deployment. None of the individuals on that list ever made it to Iraq. A few weeks ago David Albright, writing in the Washington Post, stated that he had been contacted by several Iraqi nuclear scientists who asserted that they were afraid to talk to the coalition inspectors because of the way they were being treated by the inspectors -- interrogation, threats, etc., rather than with any degree of respect. The interviewing of Iraqi scientists is where extensive experience would have been most valuable. One doesn't need to like what was done or the individual scientist to treat them with respect. Experienced inspectors knew this. Furthermore, experienced inspectors knew what, when, and how to pursue a subject that is unlikely to occur to a neophyte. There is nothing that the U.S. could threaten the Iraqi scientists with that could approach what they've endured these past 30 to 40 years. A scientist I remain in contact with had been imprisoned by Iraq for 17 months in the 1990s. In early March this year, with tensions building, he was again arrested for fear he would disclose information Iraq did not want disclosed. It is encouraging that the third and current iteration under the CIA is headed by David Kay, which may account for the recent breakthrough in uncovering the uranium-enrichment plans. In regard to other WMDS, Iraq imported or retained over the last several years key pieces of equipment that could not readily be carried off by looters. If located, extensive intrusive sampling with the right test system might tell wonders about Iraq's biological-weapons programs. Let there be no doubt, Iraq retained an active biological-weapons program. Unscom had adequate evidence of such. In 1998, presented with the evidence, the leading biological-weapons experts from the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, Sweden, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Ukraine, Romania and Canada all agreed with the Unscom findings and observations. Incredibly, U.S. and British politicians with little or no knowledge of biological weapons and biological warfare are choosing to believe otherwise. Mr. Spertzel was head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom from 1994-99. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=8623
In the car today, listening to the "Best of Sean Hannity" which may be an oxymoron of a title, I heard a call from someone attacking the Bush administration on the charges of misrepresenting the dangers of WMD. Unable to defend Bush on the basis of fact, Hannity resorted to the following spin: 1. As the caller challenging the veracity of the claims of WMD was a democrat, and liberal, and a supporter of Clinton. 2. And as Clinton executed a bombing mission on Kosovo 3. And as Clinton employed "intelligence" in his decision to bomb Kosovo. 4. And as the "intelligence" given to Clinton may have been questionable. 5. Bush did exactly what Clinton did in Kosovo (in Hannity's opinion), and the caller has no right to question Bush unless he applies the same standards to Clinton. This is major spin in action. Don't deal with the issue on its own terms, but rather dredge up something from the past, which by the way Hannity surely blistered Clinton for during his administration. Two wrongs don't make the first or the second one right. The issue is not what Clinton did, as he in unimpeachable and unelectable at this point.....where Bush is both impeachable and electable for another term of office. The real issue, which Hannity and others cannot address is the statements made prior to the war, which now appear to have been incorrect, false, or otherwise suspicious in nature. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Now, Kymar's recent cut and past job brings up an important question. Do we have the right to preemptively attack any country that possesses the knowledge of how to develop WMD? Debatable. However, we were not given the argument by the administration that we should attack Iraq on the basis of intellectual understanding of WMD, nor the fact that they were used by Iraq in the past. No, we were told implicitly that WMD existed, and were a threat to our national security. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Imagine this scenario. An American citizen who robbed a bank, did so with knowledge of weapons and how to crack safes. He was caught, and did his time in prison. The man was considered the leading expert in the use of weapons and safe cracking. He was released after his sentence and re-entered society. While in prison he converted to Islam. Next imagine we now have a safe that contains chemical weapons and or plans to build chemical weapons or other WMD. Next imagine that man joins a what some consider a Muslim religious extremist group...which he has the right to do. It is not against the law to belong to a Muslim extremist group apart from Al Queda at the moment, just ask the members of The Nation of Islam if they have the freedom to practice their religion or have hatred for some institutions in this country. Should we lock that man up because of his knowledge and the way he used his knowledge in the past.....as a preventative measure now that he has joined a group that may potentially be a threat to national security? The Constitution, in its current form says no. Yet, we now have a policy of attacking anyone who "might" be a threat to us. No smoking gun is needed, just a knowledge of where to get a gun is all we require.
No. It's not even remotely debatable. No one in his right mind should even consider such a position conceivable. There is and was no other country in the world in a directly comparable position to that of Saddam's Iraq. You've constructed a straw man, and you refuse to let go of him, as you've generally refused to consider any arguments, analysis, or evidence to the contrary. No assemblage of actual pre-war public statements or recitation of history seems likely to convince you. It may turn out that, after a fuller story emerges, that we will find individual statements by Bush himself as well as leading officials that clearly implied certainty of a more immediate threat than actually existed at some particular time that the statement could be presumed effective. It may turn out, for instance, that in August of last year Saddam had x-hundred chemical warheads at his ready disposal, but by November he was merely pretending that he might, but that the Administration was still resting on its August certitudes. There are many, many possible scenarios. In the very same set of facts, political opponents will discover scandal, while political supporters will discover trivia. What the weapons inspectors point out is that the exact status of Saddam's arsenal at any given moment was impossible for outsiders to ascertain, but that that was already a central issue: Saddam's failure to comply with measures to eradicate and verify the eradication of his country's WMD capability. Evidence may also arise at some point that in some non-trivial way Bush and his administration consciously and systematically lied. If so, they should pay a political price. I doubt that a very large number of Americans will consider that a few misstatements or subjective emphases amount to impeachable offenses or even to a more conventional scandal. We'll see. No, that is not our policy, has not been our policy, was not our policy, was not the policy we enacted, is not the policy that is or was being promoted or considered. Your rather tenuous example is close to one that I've already provided for you, and to which you've never responded. You were too busy attacking my "bias" or my writing style, as I recall. Criminals such as the one you describe might be released on probation or given parole. The terms of their release might include suspension of many normal rights, opening them to search and seizure in the absence of probable cause, imposing strict prohibition of contact with known offenders or past criminal associates, denying them access to firearms, and so on. That is very similar to the situation that Saddam's regime was in after the end of Gulf War I - except that Saddam's probation was much stricter, at least in theory, than what a typical criminal offender might get, but the probation officers were unaccountably lenient for a long time, allowing him to break the rules of his release over and over, until they finally got fed up. He was something like a convict who, instead of being incarcerated, has been required to wear an ankle bracelet locater, but has repeatedly removed the bracelet, and, then, rather than put it back on, has said he'd think about it, even set up appointments to go get a new one, but always somehow managed to find something more important to do. Finally, he holed up somewhere with hostages and past associates, promised to make his next appointment, maybe, and dared the cops to come get him if that wasn't good enough for them. The cops decided to go get him.
No, lets bomb the shit outta them with our own weapons of mass destruction to find out if they have any.
And just who appointed the United States the "Cops" of the United Nations? I thought the United Nations had its own peace keeping forces. After all, wasn't the Gulf War with Iraq, and the "terms of surrender and parole about keeping the peace? If I recall, it was the United Nations, not the United States who tried the case of Iraq, who imposed sentence, and laid down the terms of that surrender and parole period for Saddam. At what point did that "governing body" known as the United Nations empower the United States to be the enforcement arm of the United Nations, to work in a capacity as to ignore the wishes of the other members of the U.N. security council? If a state police department here at home broke from the ranks of the federal justice system to enact vigilante justice, because they didn't feel the justice department was strong enough in enforcing the terms of parole, would that be the right course of action? It was this break from the U.N., the unilateral action (with a couple of allies) and the pronouncement to the American people that WMD were an immediate threat to the national security of the United States. My point is that if you take out the immediacy of the WMD that was presented to the American people by Bush and company, it is highly unlikely that Bush would have been able to pull his break from the U.N. with as much support of the American people and those allies who joined in the effort....if he would have been able to do so at all. Just as in a murder case where the jury sits with some reasonable doubt, one piece of evidence is often enough to swing the jury. Bush swung the jury of the American people with his "evidence" of WMD. You dismiss the WMD as inconsequential to the process, I liken it to a district attorney who purposely falsified or tampered with evidence to gain a verdict in his favor. In a U.S. court, if a district attorney was found to have presented evidence that was not in fact meeting the standards of evidence, coached a witness to lie, etc. the case would be overturned and a new trial likely or release of the convicted defendant. In this case, there is no recourse. We can't undo what has been done, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't get to the bottom of what took place. Bush has a credibility issue in the eyes of many, and Bush's concern is that number may grow. His numbers continue to slowly erode in the polls. Tony Blair is in trouble, partly because of the lack of WMD being found, with the weak economy holding a much larger impact politically in Great Britain. Bush is not in trouble at the moment, but the economy looms, and some of the luster is off his military conquests because of the WMD problem. READ MY LIPS: This issue will not go away, as much as Bush supporters wish it would.
That's the trouble with analogies - at the point where the components cease being transferable, they break down. The UN is not the Federal Government of the World. The United States is not a single state within some United States of the World. The UN, like international law itself, is still in the process of being constituted, of proving or disproving its value and credibility. The analogy was intended to help explain why Saddam/Iraq - a convicted criminal - didn't have the same "rights" as any other country where WMD knowledge, programs, or arsenals might exist. Nor are questions of war and peace the same as questions of guilt and innocence in an American-style judicial system. We don't let threats to the nation's vital interests get out on technicalities. Blair has many problems, not least his unwillingness to let the British public vote on European integration, and the Conservatives, who supported him prior to the war, are now declining to hold his coat while he fights with opponents largely from his own side of the political spectrum. Most Bush supporters believe that, when the whole WMD story is better understood - particularly after additional scientists and technicians join the scientist who last week revealed buried nuclear equipment and documentation - the issue as it's been lately been played will go the way of the Baghdad Museum looting, the first week military "quagmire," and other themes-of-the-week. It's also believed that if additional WMD evidence is seen to bear Bush out, then his most vocal opponents on the issue have set themselves up for major falls. The questions of potential intelligence manipulation and possible dishonest rhetoric have already turned out to have a longer half-life than those other, obviously phony stories, but their saliency remains uncertain. I believe that people who try to make a lot out of the issues will run up against the problem that most Americans had already accepted long ago that the world would be better off without Saddam. 9/11 made them even more convinced - and the stubborn perception on the part of a large minority of Americans that Saddam was connected to 9/11 speaks to a strategic truth if not to any factual evidence of his direct participation. Americans also were not impressed with the way the UN handled Saddam, and I don't believe that Bush opponents will get very far trying to exploit nostalgia for a UN or French or German veto over US security prerogatives. In short, unless the WMD issue itself leads to the uncovering of clear, substantial wrongdoing, or the post-war re-building effort is seen to have spun completely out of control (i.e., the latest theme-of-the-week turns into a theme-of-the-year), war supporters may find themselves, at worst, having to re-state the full, rational case for the war to a largely receptive audience. Fairly or not, most Americans do not want to believe that the war was a mistake or worse, that they were egregiously lied to, and that a popular President needs to be brought down. In trading terms: A breakdown might be catastrophic for BUSH, but support looks strong to me. If things move forward in Iraq and the Middle East, if the larger Bush security strategy retains support, and if new WMD evidence continues to bolster Bush's position, then only the Trader556s, bungriders, and harrytraders of the world will see much reason even to bring possibly questionable WMD intelligence and statements up. If the economy also improves, then you'll probably need to be good at reading lips to figure out what the Democrats are saying amidst the all the Republican celebrations.