This war is illegal!

alfonso · May 30, 2003

Yeah, it stinks. Real bad.

âI think we will find either weapons of mass destruction or evidence that they were destroyed shortly before or during the war,â he said, adding, âbut yes, itâs the capability and particularly if you look at biological weapons and chemical weapons that can be manufactured in devastatingly lethal quantities in fairly short periods of time, and can be disseminated by all kinds of means, by terrorist groups or by the â¦ state itself. It does represent a substantial threat.â

- Bolton

Geezus. It's what the anti-war crowd thought all along: guilt by suspicion. That's good enough to invade and murder thousands? Gimme a break.

Just when I was getting over it, the freaking hawks up the level of bullshit even higher.

Madison · May 30, 2003

Comments Revive Doubts Over Iraq Weapons

By ROBERT H. REID
The Associated Press
Friday, May 30, 2003

BRUSSELS, Belgium - European critics of the Iraq war expressed shock Friday at published remarks by a senior U.S. official playing down Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the reason for the conflict.

In an interview in the next issue of Vanity Fair magazine, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited "bureaucratic reasons" for focusing on Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal and said a "huge" reason for the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying.

He said one reason for going to war against Iraq that was "almost unnoticed but huge" was the need to maintain American forces in Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam was in power.

Those troops were sent to Saudi Arabia to protect the desert kingdom against Saddam, whose forces invaded Kuwait in 1991, but their presence in the country that houses Islam's holiest sites enraged Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden.

Within two weeks of the fall of Baghdad, the United States announced it was removing most of its 5,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and would set up its main regional command center in Qatar.

However, those goals were not spelled out publicly as the United States sought to build international support for the war. Instead, the Bush administration focused on Saddam's failure to dismantle chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

The failure of U.S. forces to locate extensive weapons stocks has raised doubts in a skeptical Europe whether Iraq represented a global security threat.

Wolfowitz's comments followed a statement by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who suggested this week that Saddam might have destroyed his banned weapons before the war began.

On Friday, the commander of U.S. Marines in Iraq said he was surprised that extensive searches have failed to discover any of the chemical weapons that U.S. intelligence had indicated were supplied to front line Iraqi forces at the outset of the war.

"Believe me, it's not for lack of trying," Lt. Gen. James Conway told reporters. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there."

The remarks by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld revived the controversy over the war as President Bush left for a European tour in which he hopes to put aside the bitterness over the war, which threatened the trans-Atlantic partnership.

In Denmark, whose government supported the war, opposition parties demanded to know whether Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen misled the public about the extent of Saddam's weapons threat.

"It was not what the Danish prime minister said when he advocated support for the war," Jeppe Kofod, the Social Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, said in response to Wolfowitz's comments. "Those who went to war now have a big problem explaining it."

Former Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen said he was shocked by Wolfowitz's claim. "It leaves the world with one question: What should we believe?" he told The Associated Press.

In Germany, where the war was widely unpopular, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeiting newspaper said the comments about Iraqi weapons showed that America is losing the battle for credibility.

"The charge of deception is inescapable," the newspaper said Friday.

In London, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who quit as leader of the House of Commons to protest the war, said he doubted Iraq had any such weapons.

"The war was sold on the basis of what was described as a pre-emptive strike, 'Hit Saddam before he hits us,' " Cook told British Broadcasting Corp. "It is now quite clear that Saddam did not have anything with which to hit us in the first place."

During a visit to Poland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday he has "absolutely no doubt" that concrete evidence will be found of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

"Have a little patience," Blair told reporters.

Wolfowitz was in Singapore, where he is due to speak Saturday at the Asia Security Conference of military chiefs and defense ministers from Asian and key Western powers.

He told reporters at the conference that the United States will reorganize its forces worldwide to confront the threat of terrorism.

"We are in the process of taking a fundamental look at our military posture worldwide, including in the United States," Wolfowitz said. "We're facing a very different threat than any one we've faced historically."

Â© 2003 The Associated Press
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rlb21079 · May 30, 2003

"Wolfowitz's comments followed a statement by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who suggested this week that Saddam might have destroyed his banned weapons before the war began."
via Madison.

Yes, yes I understand.
---
Subordinate officer: "They say our country will be attacked if we don't show them our weapons, Chief what do we do? "

Chief: "Don't show them to anyone. Let them attack us, if they dare."
----
Subordinate officer: "Chief, they are arming to attack us, what do we do?"

Chief: "You just wait, they'll be in the palms of our hands."
---
Subordinate officer: "The enemy has declared war. The troops are at our borders and will begin the advance shortly. Our army is in place. What shall we do with our weapons?"

Chief: "Destroy them, QUICKLY! And get me the hell outa here!"
---
I don't know what took me so long to figure this out - it is so logical.

jbtrader23 · May 30, 2003

Does W really believe he'll get re elected in 2004 with this controversy? How can a president get relected if the economy is far worst off in the 4 years since he took office??

Over 2 million people have lost their jobs since he took office. State budget crisises are the worst in half a century. New York City has been reduced to fineing people sitting on milk cartons. It's truely laughable. Voters will wake up in 18 months and realize, life isn't as good as it was 4 years ago.

It just seems like a pipe dream for him to be re elected. Not to mention this WMD mess. Why would voters let him off the hook if no WMD's have been found by Nov 2004? Sending 300,000 Americans in harmsways in Iraq, and yet the reason we went there was fabricated?

KymarFye · May 30, 2003

The war's feeble opponents clutch at a last straw
by Daniel Finkelstein

Was it a quagmire? No. Did the Arab street rise? No. Did it plunge the Middle East into a crisis? No. Did the Iraqi people fight the occupiers to the death? No. Did they prefer Saddam Hussein to the Americans? No.

Every single thing that the anti-war protesters predicted would happen if we invaded Iraq did not happen. They were utterly wrong. Yet they still cling to one small sliver of hope. We have not yet found Saddamâs weapons of mass destruction.

So, as the mass graves are uncovered and the torture chambers are revealed, in Britain there remain people who wish we hadnât sent our troops. For them the freedom of millions and the fall of a genocidal maniac are fortuitous byproducts of an unjust war. The failure to find weapons makes the whole thing wrong.

I find it extraordinary that anyone should ever have wanted Saddam to remain in power, but to hold this view now is beyond belief. Of course, the protesters reply that they hated Saddam too, and were keen to get rid of him, but not through occupation.

This argument is totally disingenuous. How did they plan to depose Saddam? By taking a Thermos of vegetable soup and a placard to a rally with Charles Kennedy? Only military action could get rid of him. Those who opposed war then were propping up Saddam, even if they disliked him. And those who now say that only finding the weapons justifies the war are saying it would have been better for Saddam still to be ruling Iraq than for us to have taken the action we did. Yet even if the entire justification for war remains the weapons, the argument is nevertheless overwhelmingly on the side of George Bush and Tony Blair.

To start off with, there is a world of difference between not finding the weapons and the weapons not existing. We know that Saddam had weapons and a weapons programme. (The author would like to thank [prominent war opponent] Mr Robin Cook from Livingston for pointing this out in a number of sadly forgotten speeches in 1998. Forgotten by him anyway.) We also know that when given ample opportunity to hand them over, or prove that Iraq had destroyed them, Saddam did not do so. He said he had not documented the destruction. Given that he documented everything, including filming personal involvement in murder, how likely is this?

So if we canât find them it means he hid them well, spirited them to another country or destroyed them at the last minute because they were too incriminating.

Let us however, for a moment, accept the protestersâ case that there are no weapons to be found. Does this mean Saddam was not a threat? Of course not. Saddam had WMD know-how and his behaviour every time that world vigilance relaxed showed that he remained incredibly dangerous.

Unfortunately, by last year world vigilance was indeed relaxing. Sanctions were breaking down because there was no will to maintain them. The alternative to the decisive action that was taken was a permissive atmosphere in which Saddam could rebuild his military capability.

I believe every word that Mr Blair said about Saddamâs weapons. I wouldnât like it if he were proved a liar, but in the end I would shrug. So he exaggerated his points and his opponents exaggerated theirs. But his so-called lies saved lives and their so-called truths left people to die.

Mr Blair may have to suffer the taunts of protesters. But at least he can sleep at night knowing that in the face of injustice he did his bit for freedom, that he reunited families and liberated victims of torture. His opponents can sleep knowing that all this was done, but not in their names.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3284-696788,00.html

KymarFye · May 30, 2003

Regarding Wolfowitz's statements, taken out of context in the article pasted above by Madison and elsewhere, here is the full text (from the end of a longish phone interview):

Q: And then the last question, you've been very patient and generous. That is what's next? Where do we stand now in the campaign that you talked about right after September 11th?

Wolfowitz: I think the two most important things next are the two most obvious. One is getting post-Saddam Iraq right. Getting it right may take years, but setting the conditions for getting it right in the next six months. The next six months are going to be very important.

The other thing is trying to get some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. I do think we have a better atmosphere for working on it now than we did before in all kinds of ways. Whether that's enough to make a difference is not certain, but I will be happy to go back and dig up the things I said a long time ago which is, while it undoubtedly was true that if we could make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue we would provide a better set of circumstances to deal with Saddam Hussein, but that it was equally true the other way around that if we could deal with Saddam Hussein it would provide a better set of circumstances for dealing with the Arab-Israeli issue. That you had to move on both of them as best you could when you could, but --

There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.

I don't want to speak in messianic terms. It's not going to change things overnight, but it's a huge improvement.

Q: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into --

Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but -- hold on one second --

(Pause)

Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to --

Wolfowitz: -- there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. Sorry, hold on again.

Kellems: By the way, it's probably the longest uninterrupted phone conversation I've witnessed, so --

Q: This is extraordinary.

Kellems: You had good timing.

Q: I'm really grateful.

Wolfowitz: To wrap it up.

The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation.

Q: So this notion then that the strategic question was really a part of the equation, that you were looking at Saudi Arabia --

Wolfowitz: I was. It's one of the reasons why I took a very different view of what the argument that removing Saddam Hussein would destabilize the Middle East. I said on the record, I don't understand how people can really believe that removing this huge source of instability is going to be a cause of instability in the Middle East.

I understand what they're thinking about. I'm not blind to the uncertainties of this situation, but they just seem to be blind to the instability that that son of a bitch was causing. It's as though the fact that he was paying $25,000 per terrorist family and issuing regular threats to most friendly governments in the region and the long list of things was of no account and the only thing to think about was that there might be some inter-communal violence if he were removed.

The implication of a lot of the argumentation against acting -- the implication was that the only way to have the stability that we need in Iraq is to have a tyrant like Saddam keeping everybody in check -- I know no one ever said it that way and if you pointed it out that way they'd say that's not what I mean. But I believe that really is where the logic was leading.

Q: Which also makes you wonder about how much faith there is in spreading democracy and all the rest among some of those who --

Wolfowitz: Probably not very much. There is no question that there's a lot of instability that comes with democracy and it's the nature of the beast that it's turbulent and uncertain.

The thing is, at a general level, I've encountered this argument from the defenders of Asian autocracies of various kinds. Look how much better off Singapore is than Indonesia, to pick a glaring contrast. And Indonesia's really struggling with democracy. It sort of inherited democracy under the worst possible conditions too, one might say. But the thing that -- I'd actually say that a large part of Indonesia's problems come from the fact that dictatorships are unstable in the one worst way which is with respect to choosing the next regime. Democracy, one could say, has solved, not solve perfectly, but they represent one of the best solutions to one of the most fundamental instabilities in politics and that's how to replace one regime with another. It's the only orderly way in the world for doing it other than hereditary monarchy which doesn't seem to have much of a future.

Q: Thanks so much.

Wolfowitz: You're very welcome.

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html
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KymarFye · May 30, 2003

Quote from rlb21079:

"Wolfowitz's comments followed a statement by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who suggested this week that Saddam might have destroyed his banned weapons before the war began."
via Madison.

Yes, yes I understand.
---
Subordinate officer: "They say our country will be attacked if we don't show them our weapons, Chief what do we do? "

Chief: "Don't show them to anyone. Let them attack us, if they dare."
----
Subordinate officer: "Chief, they are arming to attack us, what do we do?"

Chief: "You just wait, they'll be in the palms of our hands."
---
Subordinate officer: "The enemy has declared war. The troops are at our borders and will begin the advance shortly. Our army is in place. What shall we do with our weapons?"

Chief: "Destroy them, QUICKLY! And get me the hell outa here!"
---
I don't know what took me so long to figure this out - it is so logical.
More...

More like:

SUB: "If the Americans attack, is not our best chance to inflict casualties on them to utilize chemical and biological weapons?"

MILITARY EXPERT: "The Americans are well-prepared, and it is unlikely that the use or attempted battlefield use of such weapons would have any significant military impact other than to ensure the destruction of the unit that deployed them. In addition, attempts to create, deploy, or employ such weapons in large numbers would likely be detected. For our purposes the retention of key scientists and technicians, some dual use equipment, and relatively small amounts of precursor chemicals should be sufficient to preserve our capacity into the future. The mobile chem-bio labs alone can seed an entire arsenal. "

POLITICAL EXPERT: "Most important, if any such weapons are used or detected, then our political strategy will fall apart. The Peace Movement is critical to our hope of forcing the Americans and British to withdraw after as they sink into the quagmire, and as casualties mount. World opinion would turn diametrically against us if we used WMDs. Our main ally, France, has already publically declared that they will abandon us if we use WMDs."

SADDAM: "All WMDs are to be hidden or moved out of country, and, if there is any doubt about their security, to be destroyed in secret. Only absolutely essential equipment and precursor materials are to be preserved. If any such weapons are discovered, then the officer, scientist, or technician who is responsible will have his eyes gouged out, but only after being forced to witness the rape, torture, and murder of all members of his immediate family. So it shall be."

rlb21079 · May 30, 2003

gotcha

hey, you didn't think I was anti-war did you?
hogwash if you did, I like every other red-blooded American, love war and really only hate those who don't - otherwise I am a freedom loving individual

KymarFye · May 30, 2003

Quote from rlb21079:

gotcha

hey, you didn't think I was anti-war did you?
hogwash if you did, I like every other red-blooded American, love war and really only hate those who don't - otherwise I am a freedom loving individual
More...

<img src="http://home.pacbell.net/ckmcld/Caution_You_re_Not_as_Funny.gif" border="0" alt="">

trader556 · May 30, 2003

Keymar, for someone that tries to come across as an intelligent person yer sure full of $hit.

What the friggin F$&k is wrong with you and the rest of the warmongers.

Rumsfeld concedes banned Iraqi weapons may not exist

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=410468

Can you bring back our DEAD SOLDIERS?? Can you bring back the thousand of innocent Iraqi children men and women? All the death and destruction, for what? So Hullibarton gets more illegal contracts courtesy of of our hard earned tax money, and the rest of the oil cos steal Iraq's oil???

You regurgitate Wolfowitz's garbage

Before you and your kind places faith on what this Oil Shrub Mafia and Co claiming read this:

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18169

Do you read anything posted ? or just eat up all the garbage you are fed from the criminals on top?

We are becoming a hated nation, with thugs and criminals at the top, we have stooped lower that the terrorists we are supposed to get. Lies death and destruction.

What the friggin F$%k are we doing?