I am in Irbil in Kurdistan northern Iraq. Someone explained the history of this place to me today. The mountains here are bare and devoid of trees. They used be forested. Covered with trees. There used to be so many trees in Irbil that you couldn’t see around corners. Now it looks like Kansas or really more like parts of Montana.
The reason is that Saddam cut down all of the trees in Kurdistan in 1988. He bulldozed 4000 of the 5000 villages in Kurdistan and the Kurds ran to the mountains for safety, so he cut down all of the trees on these mountains and killed all of the game, so that the Kurds would have no wood for fires and no food to eat. He was incredibly effective. The Kurds are now replanting the trees. You can see hundreds of tiny trees if you look closely at the mountains. I didn’t notice them until they were pointed out to me. In Kirkuk they found a mass grave of Kurdish children. One of the U.N. guys offered to take us out and show it to us. I haven’t taken him up on it. I have no reason to go there and I feel like it would be disrespectful to go and gawk. I guess some of the children were buried with their toys and dolls.
It makes me sick everytime I surf the net and see all these people in Europe and back home saying that the war was not justified because we haven’t found 50 tons of sarin gas yet. I wish those people would come to this country and look at ruined villages between here and Kirkuk and the bare mountains. Anyone who protested against this war and defended Saddam ought to be ashamed of themselves. Its just unimaginable the things that went on here.
As I’ve said many times before, I was in favor of the war, and was in favor of it partially because of the terrible things Saddam did. But I think this misses the point of the current debate, which is whether the US and its allies exaggerated or outright fabricated evidence of WMD in Iraq in order to get support for the war.
I don’t know whether they did or not or, if they did, how much they did. Maybe it was a series of honest mistakes and overestimations. Maybe the WMD are there and just haven’t been found yet. Those things are certainly possible. It definitely seems unlikely that Saddam would risk his own destruction and would insure that the sanctions remained in place if he didn’t have anything to hide.
Even so, though, if it turns out that the US did lie about the WMD, stuff like this email is completely irrelevant. If your point is that Saddam was so terrible that we were right to take him out whether he had WMD or not, I might agree with you, but that’s beside the point–because that’s not what the Bush administration said it was doing. If they thought Saddam had to go because of human rights violations, they could and should have said so. If the country wouldn’t back that idea and Bush felt like he couldn’t go to war without the will of the people, then he shouldn’t go to war. It would be wrong (if this is what happened) for Bush to decide: “Saddam has to go because of the human rights violations. But the public will never agree to that and I can’t go to war without public support. So I’ll make up a bunch of lies about how Saddam has WMD, to get people on board. In the end, they’ll just be agreeing to go to war, which is the right thing anyway.”
I agree with you that that would be wrong. Good thing that’s absolutely not what happend!
:D
Also…I just never cease to be amazed at what a horrible murdering fiend Saddam was.
I do have a feeling that the WMD question may end up being essentially unanswerable. Unless we find the weapons we may never know what the situation really was.
I think that you still aren’t mentioning the real legal basis for the war which was not the possibility of Saddam having WMD, but rather his failure to PROVE that he didn’t have WMD.
That is what all the resolutions called for. He had to unilaterally demonstrate that he had definitely disarmed. He never did and he payed the consequences.
The only reason I can think of that so many people are latching onto this faux “Bush lied about WMD” meme is because it’s the only issue that casts even a slight shadow over what was actually one of the most amazing and successful military campaigns in history.
Bullshit. It could possible be that the President lied to the entire country and took us to war under false pretenses.
He said that Iraq posed an imminent theat to the United States. Powell got up there and told us all about the evil mobile germ labs (and by the way, those vehicles they found might not be anything more than hydrogen producers for artillery & weather balloons) and told up about this whole program to play hide the WMD.
We’ve found shit.
What’s more interesting is all the people that jumped on Clinton for lying about getting a blow job are all of a sudden making excuses for Bush and saying that WMD wasn’t a big deal in the first place.
Slight shadow? It’s beginning to look like the casus belli was a flat-out lie. Britain’s really starting to look into things, with full parliamentary inquiries on what Tony Blair presented to both the house and the public at large. Judging by the way the heat is being ratcheted up there, it seems likely that Labour will turf Blair at some point in the near future.
It’s interesting that Britain is actually asking these hard questions about the war, while the US is ignoring even the suggestion of something untoward. Where’s the world’s leading democracy now? Where’s Congress? The US has occupied another country, possibly under false pretences, and thrown a society into anarchy, yet all the American people can do is watch Bush land on an aircraft carrier and put Martha Stewart into the spotlight for goofy insider trading charges. No matter what you think of the war and the reasons behind it, questions need to be answered. Hell, even Paul Wolfowitz is saying that the WMD thing was “bureaucratic.” That’s pretty interesting, because just a few months back Bush and Blair were telling everyone that Saddam was developing the capability to blow up the entire region.
Actually the people who ought to be ashamed are not those who protested the war, but those who launched it with a promise to the Turks that whatever happened, the Kurds would not be freed from Iraq to have their own nation. Those people would be our President and his administration.
They would have never made that promise if they were motivated by the Kurdish situation in their push to war. It is an immoral promise, and an arrogant one; it presumes that the United States has the right to subject a people to a permanent status as an oppressed minority in order to achieve its own self-absorbed diplomatic aims.
To attempt to use the Kurds now to justify the war in place of the lies about weapons of mass destruction propagated on the American public is disingeneous, to say the least.
You know, even I thought Iraq had WMD, I just didn’t think it was a threat. Looks like either Pollack lied to me or he got snowed.
All these moralistic posthoc justifications for the invasion are such bullshit. I’m sure the rank and file is well-meaning, but the leadership is just shedding crocodile tears. They supported columbian death squads, remember?
Exactly. Spoofy, I agree that Saddam was in violation of the resolutions, and that the resolutions basically say that if he’s in violation, we can go to war. No argument. The question, though, is this: did the American public want to go to war? Because it’s not like Bush just got up there and said “Saddam’s in violation, let’s roll.” He said Saddam had WMD. If that was a lie, that’s a huge issue in my mind, comparable to Watergate. You say that’s not what happened. I guess I’m not as sanguine about the whole thing. What makes you think that’s not what happened?
And I reject Derek’s “end justifies the means” analysis. I don’t think it does. An American president obviously does not need to tell the American public everything he knows; much must be kept secret. But an American president should never lie to the public to get them to go to war because the president thinks he knows, better than everyone else does, whether it’s morally right to go to war. If he thinks he knows better than everyone else, he should just go to war and say “I know things you don’t.” If he’s proven right, I’m sure he’ll come out fine.
That’s right, guys. Keep on believing that the complete lack of evidence that Saddam destroyed any of the WMD he admitted to having right after the Gulf War (and still unaccounted for by admission of the UN) is just some wacky misunderstanding between bureaucracies. I’m sure the Iraqis were being honest about it after all.
And remember, WMD are best stored in a conspicuous mountain shaped arrangement of warheads and plutonium in the middle of, say, the CNN Baghdad parking lot. This makes the fact that CNN hasn’t reported on them being found after almost two months (!) proof that the weapons Saddam swore he had and the UN inspectors actually found before the invasion never really existed to begin with.
There was loads of evidence before the invasion, much of it coming from the UN itself, that Iraq hadn’t disarmed and wasn’t complying. Third parties objectively considering the Iraq debate, like Ken Pollack, took the existence of Saddam’s WMD as unassailable. Trying to break it down into “Bush lied” is a such an ugly distortion that I’m not sure whether to think the people spreading it just have no memory for history besides whatever meme they absorbed from today’s editorial comic pages, or just addle-minded. If Saddam didn’t have WMD, then everyone was fooled, except the people who naysayed everything (like the rape camps and the jails full of children) to begin with.
One of the problems with explaining Quantum Iraqi Invasion Nano-Dynamics to the layman is that many of its most fundamental results can be so counter-intuitive. For example, consider the WMD wave function, which describes (or, more precisely, whose square describes) how the probability of finding WMD caches in Iraq changes over time and space. In a 24-dimensional manifold, this wave function conserves Einstein symmetries when rotated about any non-forbidden Higgs-Frum conjugate axis. What this implies is that any non-degenerate WMD particle is, when viewed from an eigenaxis, its own anti-particle, which means it instantly annihilates itself in inverse hyperbolic anti-time, causing the Big Bang to happen. Hence, in a seeming paradox, the absence of WMD in Iraq not only proves that they exist, but also explains how our universe came to be created from nothing. Seems strange, but physics tells us that this is not only logically consistent, but logically required. And, conversely, if we did find WMD, it could very easily set in motion a set of processes which would cause the universe to wink out of existence entirely, something which would no doubt please far Left moral relativists like Jim Jeffords and Brent Scowcroft. Or else they fell through a wormhole into Syria.[/quote]
Then where is it? Why is that one Iraqi general saying that Saddam destroyed it all in the mid-90s? Why are a torrent of CIA leaks coming out that they were pressured to make up evidence? Why is the right suddenly so disaparging towards the WMD justifications they were using just two months ago?
Although I basically don’t give a shit whether “The American People” wanted to go to war or not.
I wanted to go to war!
Hehe…I kid. Actually, I don’t care because “The American People” aren’t the commander in chief and they don’t have access to the information he has access to.
I think of it this way. There were basically about 10 incredibly compelling reasons to go to war. One of them was the possibility of WMD and other weapons that could potentially have been used by terrorists aided by Saddam.
This is the angle that the administration spent the most time publicizing, but even if it turns out that the WMD threat was less than thought or even that Saddam destroyed all his WMD on the Wednesday before the war started and we never find them, that still doesn’t invalidate the 9 other incredibly good reasons to invade and liberate Iraq.
Now, as I said, if it would turn out that there was absolutely no evidence of WMD and all the evidence presented was simply manufactured, then you would certainly have a huge scandal that would rock the presidency as much as Watergate in all likelihood.
But I just don’t think that’s likely. You may continue to doubt if you want though!
Also…even if that were the case, I would still be happy that we liberated Iraq…not only for the Iraqis, but so that free people everywhere can enjoy their Honey Nut Cheerios at night without having to worry that their skim milk has Iraqi anthrax in it.
Sure, me too. I think the human rights violations were enough reason to go to war, so I’m glad we went and will remain glad we went even if it turns out there were no WMD at all. But if Bush lied about what reasons there were to go, that’s still bad and a very big deal.
There’s more than enough to reason that WMD still exist, though the quantities were probably way exaggerated.
As for a threat to others… one could still make the case that this was so. Remember Iraq threatened US citizens every day of the fucking week by attempting to shoot down US and British aircraft in the no-fly zones – an act of war in of itself. A weak argument to be sure, but still very viable.
I’ve been hearing for a month or so that the Administration wanted to serve the war as an abject lesson to the rest of the arab nations not to fuck, directly or indirectly, with the United States. I think several of them got that message. The way we used that method (the method is very direct and rightly so, a far cry from the Clinton method of sending a dozen cruise missiles and calling it a victory) was simply stupid – I’m no Bush fan, and I was very much for the war, mostly because it needed to be done, period.
Taking care of business.
There’s no doubt that Bush and his cronies have taken a lot of political damage abroad because of this, not to mention here in the US. If they don’t find a nice amount of WMDs soon, Bush will have a really hard time getting re-elected. I wouldn’t vote for him anyway, unless Lieberman was the leading Democrat ticket.
I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.
It suggests a strain of zealotry in this White House that regards the question of war as just another political debate. It isn’t. More than 100 fine Americans were killed in this conflict, dozens of British soldiers, and many thousands of Iraqis. Nobody gets killed or maimed in Capitol Hill maneuvers over spending plans, or battles over federal court appointments. War is a special case. It is the most serious step a nation can take, and it deserves the highest measure of seriousness and integrity.
When a president lies or exaggerates in making an argument for war, when he spins the facts to sell his case, he betrays his public trust, and he diminishes the credibility of his office and our country. We are at war. What we lost in this may yet end up being far more important than what we gained.
They used lies and half truths to market the war and anyone is surprised? I don’t care so much about the reasons behind the war, what I would like to see is a real interest in rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq. That would be a pleasant surprise.
Oh I’m sorry, I thought we found 14 of those trailers that we pinpointed with sattalites and they all were set up to be used as portable bio and chemical weapons factories which tests indicate that that is exactly what was in there.
You want absolute proof that we’ve found what we were looking for: when’s the last time the actual news, and not just a columnist, reported that ‘Nothing has been found was the war justified?’? Not for months.
Then again you know those jews and their manipulation of the media.
Much has been made this week of two trailers, found in northern Iraq near Mosul, that the CIA says are “mobile biological-weapon production plants.” In a May 28 report, considered so significant that the administration released it to the public, the agency goes so far as to call the trailers “the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological-warfare program.”
The report notes that the trailers contain a fermenter, water-supply tanks, an air compressor, a water-chiller, a device for collecting exhaust gases?just the right components for an “ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system.” The trailers are also “strikingly similar” to descriptions of mobile-bioweapons plants provided by Iraqi exiles who claim to have worked in them or witnessed others who did. Secretary of State Colin Powell displayed drawings, based on these descriptions, during his Feb. 5 “smoking-gun” briefing to the U.N. Security Council.
Read closely, though, the CIA report reveals considerable ambiguity about the nature of these vehicles. For example, it notes that Iraqi officials?presumably those currently being interrogated?say the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather-balloons. (Many Army units float balloons to monitor the accuracy of artillery fire.) In response to this claim, the report states:
Some of the features of the trailer?a gas-collection system and the presence of caustic?are consistent with both bioproduction and hydrogen production. The plant’s design possibly could be used to produce hydrogen using a chemical reaction, but it would be inefficient. The capacity of this trailer is larger than the typical units for hydrogen production for weather balloons.
One could ask: Since when was Saddam’s Iraq considered a model of efficiency?
The report concedes that U.S. officials found no traces of any bioweapons agent inside the trailers. “We suspect,” it states, “that the Iraqis thoroughly decontaminated the vehicle to remove evidence.” That’s possible.
The report also notes that, in order to produce biological weapons, each trailer would have to be accompanied by a second and possibly a third trailer, specially designed to grow, process, sterilize, and dry the bacteria. Such trailers would “have equipment such as mixing tanks, centrifuges, and spray dryers”?none of which were spotted in the trailers that were found. The problem, the CIA acknowledges, is that “we have not yet found” these post-production trailers. Question: Is it that they haven’t been found?or that they don’t exist?
You want absolute proof that we’ve found what we were looking for: when’s the last time the actual news, and not just a columnist, reported that ‘Nothing has been found was the war justified?’? Not for months.
Then again you know those jews and their manipulation of the media.
I’m thinking that “news” is supposed to report facts. The fact is no WMDs have been discovered yet. Any criticism or support of Bush’s actions is an opinion.
Then where is it? Why is that one Iraqi general saying that Saddam destroyed it all in the mid-90s? Why are a torrent of CIA leaks coming out that they were pressured to make up evidence? Why is the right suddenly so disaparging towards the WMD justifications they were using just two months ago?
I dunno about the “right”, which you always use as if it is some sort of cohesive political movement with the same immediately identifiable and morally repugnant end goal as, say, S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
I know that I haven’t read anything though from people that supported the war that disparaged the evidence for WMD, though. People who believed in the war tended to believe in it because of both WMD and the shocking human rights abuses in Iraq. The latter has been proven to be worse than anyone imagined, which already justifies it for most people. The former have not as of writing been broadcast on CNN, but, as I said before, unless you believe that Iraq just lost the paper trail for destroying a hundred chemical warheads and forgot where they’d thrown them out, it is hard to believe that the Iraqi WMD drama unfolding for the last ten years has just been a wacky mistake. The UN’s request was unambiguous; Iraq never complied. So most people think that the stash will be found, espectially considering it is a relatively small stash (Pollack says probably something less than a hundred missiles) in a huge country and consequently not easy to find. I’m one of them.
By the way, way to make naivete into an almost beatific quality with your sheepish assertion that an Iraqi general’s word on the existence of WMD is, say, any more or less trustworthy than the Iraqi general’s word on whether or not the Americans have taken Saddam International Airport.
Except for Hans Blix, apparently.
Nice lie here, Jason. You know damn well Blix never said that he believed Iraq didn’t have WMD… in fact, he stated over and over again that Iraq wasn’t complying with UN resolutions and hadn’t proven jack shit as to their destruction, as it was incumbent upon them according to the resolutions to do. What he did say was that we should allow more time for inspections to work. Is this the sort of complete revisionism we can continue to expect from your enlightened mind?
