Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Logic error: you’re equating “WMD programs” and “WMD components” with “WMD stockpiles”.

Stockpiles mean completed weapons.
Programs and components mean uncompleted weapons.

Hell, a piece of aluminum is a “WMD component” if you want to call it one.

There’s no story here.

What is happening is that the anti-war crowd is trying to spin Kay’s words into something that supports their position, which Kay emphatically rejects:

“[T]hat is not the same thing as saying it was not a serious, imminent threat. That is a political judgment, not a technical judgment.”
—Associated Press article today.

All that Kay is saying is that while Iraq did indeed violate a number of UN resolutions/orders/Gulf War cease fire, weapons inspectors have not found any stockpiles of weapons.

That in and of itself is not a huge issue. If it turns out to be true that Saddam had no stockpiles it simply means we didn’t wait until he did. He had them in the past, used them in the past and refused to comply with UN resolutions and the Gulf War cease-fire to prove he was not building them again.

That is all the “justification” we needed to liberate Iraq.

Similarly, we *thought* Nazi Germany was trying to build an atomic bomb. It turned out that they were nowhere near building one even by 1945. That doesn’t invalidate our war against them, nor our own very expensive program to build one first.

Whoa, Brett Kottmann, “we *thought* Nazi Germany was trying to build an atomic bomb. It turned out that they were nowhere near building one even by 1945.” I think there is something totally different between World War II and the war in Iraq. For one thing Germany was trying to take over Western Europe, Africa and the West Asia, and we were drawn into the war with a direct attack from a nation-state that announced nation-state hostilities. Our war on Iraq was prompted by a Pearl Harbor-caliber attack on our soil, but Iraq never took responsibility and our attempts to pin some blame on them have been, as far as I know, tenuous, and Iraq certainly didn’t seem to be keen on taking over more soil after we already kicked them out of Kuwait in ‘91.

The U.S.’s belief of Germany’s interest in developing the atomic bomb was, unless I am mistaken, cursory to our entry into the war. We didn’t enter World War II because we thought at some point Germany was an imminent threat but because the Axis Powers had already proven to be one.

My personal take on Kay is that he started off believing there could be WMD and probably were, to realizing in his inspector role, that there probably weren’t any WMD and yet for over 6 months he felt compelled to speak the Cheney line of lies that there are WMD and we will find them, until he just couldn’t in good conscience keep up the false act, and decided to leave the role. Which in turn resulted in his replacement.

President Bush tried to pull the same trick in his State of the Union speech the other night. Bush cited Kay’s report that “dozens of Weapons of Mass Destruction related program activities” were uncovered.

“Related program activities” could mean anything from sketches of factories to create weapons to calculations to build a missle to meeting to discuss where materials could be purchased. Either way, neither Kay’s report or Pres. Bush’s spin in his speech point to any actual WMDs. Not exactly immiment destruction, was it?

Mr. Frelich, I think we can trust David Kay, who’s been in a position to examine the evidence himself, an encounter the realities of the field, more than we can trust all the armchair weapons inspectors we have here at home.

The justifying premise behind Gulf War II was the unconventional weapons that Saddam allegedly had, tied with the close relationship Saddam was supposed to have with Al Quaeda. The last time we went in to Iraq, post-Gulf War I, there was an incriminating paper trail, despite the best efforts of Baathists to destroy the documents. That’s what lead us to many of the sites, and what allowed us to destroy so much of their WMDs the last time around.

But this time, we have not been lead to any great finds, or any active, productive operations. We have only been lead to signs that Saddam destroyed, or shipped out of the country his unconventional weapons, which means, they weren’t in his hands to be the awful, immediate threat they were supposed to be. There was no operating nuclear program, so it would have been years before Saddam could have made his bombs. That line, spoken not so long ago by Bush, of the next smoking gun being a mushroom cloud could not have been farther from the truth.

The irony is that containment worked. Saddam couldn’t gain the materials or the technology he need to create weapons stockpiles. Because of that, he was forced to jerk around the rest of the world to save face.

The further irony is, that Bush’s foreign policy, with all the weight given to ideological concerns, proved the perfect dupe for Saddam’s con game. A perfect partner for a tragedy of errors, each side undone by what they tried to hide, or never bothered to find out.

My personal take on Kay is that he started off believing there could be WMD and probably were, to realizing in his inspector role, that there probably weren’t any WMD and yet for over 6 months he felt compelled to speak the Cheney line of lies that there are WMD and we will find them, until he just couldn’t in good conscience keep up the false act, and decided to leave the role. Which in turn resulted in his replacement.

David:

I’m glad you began your post with concluding that it is your “personal opinion.” If not for those words, the post would have been utterly laughable. In your attempt to bolster your argument, you not only smear David Kay, but cast aspersions on all his work.

Yet Kay has been rather open on this. He says he expected to find weapons but has not found “stockpiles” of them. He HAS found evidence of weapons programs that violated the UN resolutions, but also has stated that the intelligence community was not very accurate. Note please that the intelligence community includes those from several other countries, as well as those from previous US administrations, all of whom believed the weapons to exist.

In fact, if the weapons did not exist, then it is hard to support Operation Desert Fox, unless one chooses to believe withOUT evidence that our bombing at that time destroyed weapons. There is no evidence to support this, unless you choose to believe that the absence of weapons today indicates they were destroyed in 1998.

I believe Bush acted properly by invading Iraq; however, i have always disagreed with his emphasis on WMD’s as a reason.

Opinions abound here. The more secrecy in government, the more opinions will grow in both number and character. Funny, how that works, same as it worked in the “dark ages”.

The problem, Joe, comes in that Bush justified this to the international community based on those assertions.

As the saying goes, Success has many fathers, but failure is always an orphan. Well, this war is an orphan. The cause for which it was fought, that is, to prevent Al Quaeda from gaining unconventional weapons and keeping a government’s support, has been left out in the cold, unacknowledged and forgotten.

Everything else we were trying to do came from that motivating set of fears. We were told of stockpiles, of WMDs in the hands of terrorists. We were not told that the big threat was weapons of mass destruction program activities, we were told there were stockpiles and terrorists, each waiting to make their fateful connection.

But that has not turned out to be the case. We didn’t even find production facilities in any shape to produce the weapons. We certainly didn’t find a substantial Al Quaeda presence, either.

Is this what we broke with the American tradition of defensive war for? Is this what we’ve sidetracked ourselves from much less speculative threats for? I mean, the harm in what Bush has done is that with a real set of threats out there, Bush has had us chasing a patchwork of half-truths, bluffs takens too seriously, and intelligence shaped by by the expectations of an administration spoiling to settle some scores.

We have lost hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of American lives. We’ve won serious victories, but those victories, if one recalls, were supposed to be in the service of answering threats now revealed to be false. This was an elective war, not a necessary one, and it’s one that has likely inflicted more damage on America’s ability to project power rather than augmenting it as it was supposed to.

Because Bush could not compromise in his agenda, America, as a whole, has seen our agenda in the rest of the world compromised for the sake of fighting his Axis of Evil.

Just for the record I heard Kay being interviewed on the radio a few nights ago and he distanced himself from the Telegraph article. He refuted that he has contradicted himself and shot down the WMD to Syria claim. As I recall he said that this article compressed what he had said. He never directly implied that the WMD were moved to Syria, merely that there was a lot of traffic in that direction prior to the war. Thats all. Nothing about WMD being moved.

Today Kay said that the entire intelligence community (including, he says, France and Germany) agreed that Iraq had WMDs and/or active WMD programs.

What is the nature of this “agreement” within the intelligence community? This is what I want to know.

For example, was this “agreement” unanimous, or was it only among a faction within the intelligence community?

They may have agreed about the existence of WMDs and WMD programs, but how advanced did they estimate these programs to be? For example, perhaps there was some kind of agreement across the community, but what did they agree about?

Maybe the consensus view was that Saddam had a handful of WMD scientists whose job it was to read western medical journals.

Maybe there was universal agreement that Saddam may still have a hundred mustard gas canisters buried in concrete.

Maybe there was agreement that Saddam had a dozen underground facilities with hundreds of scientists cranking out AAA-battery sized nerve gas canisters by the truckload.

Maybe there was a universal view that Saddam was months away from posessing a nuclear weapon.

Whatever this “consensus” was, it wasn’t enough to convince the governments of France, Germany, Canada, and many other nations that it was urgent enough to go to war. It didn’t convince me, either, but then again I have no idea what this evidence was.

According to the President and countless members of the administration, they *knew* (not that they suspected, but they *knew*) about specific stockpiles of specific weapons. Turns out that was either a lie or a rather sloppy interpretation of intelligence.

Kay is spinning history here. Until we know what the “evidence” actually was (was it a CIA-obtained sample of Anthrax fresh-from-the-petri-dish, or was it some kind of crayon-scrawled “intelligence report” from that transparent con artist Chalabi), the only people we can trust are those people who saw the evidence - many of whom have since turned out to be, shall we say, extraordinary benders of truth.

-Cf

Why did some people support the war and some who did not, even though they had access to the same intelligence?

There are many parties who saw some or most of the intelligence in question and were NOT convinced. One example is, of course, the enormous group of coalition and friendly nations that opposed the invasion of Iraq. Another subset, here in the US, is a small group of Senators and Congress members who had access to much of the administration’s intelligence documents and still opposed the war.

Of those parties who had partial access to the intelligence and who DID support the war, such as many Senators and Congress members or the United Kingdom, I often wonder WHY they supported the war. Several options come to mind (pick as many as you like):

1) They thought the evidence was 100% convincing: Saddam needed to be stopped immediately or else he would use WMDs somewhere (i.e., they absolutely did the right thing). Given that there are no WMDs, this seems improbable.

2) They thought the evidence was MORE than 50% convincing, but they didn’t think it was worth the risk to be wrong (i.e., maybe they did the right thing). If I were in this position, I’m not sure what I would do.

3) They thought the evidence was probably LESS than 50% convincing, but they didn’t think it was worth the risk to be wrong (i.e., maybe they’re a little overcautious).

4) They thought the evidence was probably way LESS than 50% convincing, but they were willing to roll the dice on it (i.e., they’re a compulsive gambler)

5) They feared the political consequences of opposing the war (i.e., they are politicians).

6) The most important thing to them was the potential strategic or humanitarian result of toppling Saddam, and the WMD issue was a minor factor.

-Cf

Yeah I’ve wondered about the “consensus of agreement” about Saddam having WMD prior to the war. As I recall there were plenty of people who refused to believe that Saddam provided a credible military threat before the war.

The Hutton report, published yesterday, was basically caused by a BBC journalist (Gilligan)questioning the intelligence presented on Saddam’s WMD in the September dossier. Gilligan suggested that Blair had put the “45 minutes to deploy WMD” claim in knowing it was false. The truth, at best, is they put in this horrible piece of propaganda in hoping, but never certain, that it was correct because it helped generate/maintain the climate of fear needed for their agenda.

In opposition to Kay’s stated belief (though he limited it to a couple of countries), there was was plenty of doubts prior to the war.

The Hutton report was a total whitewash by the way. His judgement did not tally with the weight of evidence at all.

Dear Joebagodonuts,

- No WMDs
- No link Saddam - Al Qaeda

Yet you say Bush made the right decision in Invading Iraq.

Yours must be a good argument for war. I can’t wait to hear it.

Germán
Madrid, Spain