STING2 said:
#1 What would you have done about Saddam's failure to verifiably disarm of all WMD per UN 1991 Gulf War Ceacefire Agreement? Realize that the United States and other countries had tried everything short of military invasion to resolve the problem peacefully over the past 12 years, but ultimately failed to achieve the objective.
I have every reason to believe that you?ve researched the relevant U.N. resolutions and the ceasefire agreement extensively and, as has been pointed out so often on this board, you have cited the resolutions time and time again. I am not going to look up the U.N. resolutions that you have cited (although I did read and re-read them when you first referenced them here back around the time that the invasion began). The resolutions have been debated here many times and I am not sure that anyone?s mind has been changed by those arguments. That said, I do understand that you believe you have an airtight argument with respect to the resolutions. My only response would be that I am not convinced that president Bush went to war solely due to Sadaam's non-compliance with resolutions. Remember that, according to CBS News, "Richard Clarke said that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan. Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld was joking."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml
#2 Considering that the planet depends on Persian Gulf Oil for its economy and standard of living, what would you have done to insure that Saddam would never be able to commit the his previous actions to include, the unprovoked invasion and attack of four different countries, threatening the planets energy supply with siezure or sabotage, threatening the planet with global economic depression and ruin?
Why didn?t Sadaam sabotage the planet?s energy supply after Gulf War I? Wouldn?t you agree that if he could have he
would have?
?the murder of 1.7 million people to include Iraqi's and other people through out the Persian Gulf?
Again, I am
convinced that the majority of westerners did not care about gassed Kurds or murdered Iraqis until it became convenient to do so. I never heard a word about Iraq?s oppressed peoples outside of the context of the U.S. going to war with Iraq?.. and, to some degree, I seem to recall reading of discussion amongst certain groups (usually women) who were concerned about the treatment of women in Iraq. Sting, are you willing to assert that, between Gulf War I and II, there was a national debate/discussion of the atrocities committed by Hussein in Iraq??
?thousands of Kuwaiti citizens continue to remain unaccounted for from Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the use of WMD more times than any other country in history, as a percantage of GDP the largest investment in the development of WMD, stringing out and playing games with an inspection process that was only supposed to take 2 years and ended up with the removal of UN inspectors and the prevention of the return for four full years, the refusal to account for thousands of liters of Anthrax, hundreds of pounds of mustard gas, over 20,000 Bio/Chem capable shells, Sarin Gas and other WMD related material?
Okay, I hear ya, but Sting, the bottom line is, we were told we were going to war with Iraq because of an
imminent threat. It turns out that, as best we can tell, there was no imminent threat. Those ?thousands of liters of Anthrax, hundreds of pounds of mustard gas, over 20,000 Bio/Chem capable shells, Sarin Gas and other WMD related material? apparently no longer exist, if they ever did.
The following text is taken from David Kay?s interim report:
[q]
?What have we found and what have we not found in the first 3 months of our work? We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later??
http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2003/david_kay_10022003.html[/q]
Kay?s doublespeak makes it sound as though his team had found significant evidence and yet, later in the report, he essentially said that they had not found
any physical components of biological or nuclear weapons. Just ?concealment efforts?? oh, and the burned remnants of computers which may or may not have been used as databases for destructive purposes.
You?ll recall that Kay later quit the Iraq Survey Group:
[q]In an interview with Reuters news agency after his resignation was announced, Mr Kay said he did not believe there had been large-scale production of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. "I don't think they existed," Mr Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production programme in the 90s."
"I think we have found probably 85% of what we're going to find."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3424831.stm[/q]
Continuing with your points:
[q]
#3 Many people who opposed the war focused on the cost of it without ever considering the cost of not going to war? Based on the facts above, what do you think the cost of letting Saddam stay in power could potentially have been, both for the planet and the region as well as the Iraqi people, millions of whom had been murdered, raped, and tortured by that mans regime over the previous 24 years? [/q]
In answer to #3, please see my responses to #2 above.
#4 What do you think of the fact that John Kerry and 75% of the United States Congress as well as the majority of the American people supported the use of military force to insure that Saddam was disarmed?
I?m not going to jump to Kerry?s defense here. Elsewhere on this forum I?ve stated my disagreement with his position on terrorism. As for the rest of congress, in my opinion many Democrats showed with their vote that they have no backbone. As for the American people, I concede that this is a conservative nation. I think Americans were duped by their president. I think Americans trusted their president and he played upon their fears of a terrorist attack.... of an imminent threat posed by Iraq.
#5 So often, people mention "Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz" without mentioning George Bush's chief advisor on Foreign Policy, Colin Powell!
I?ll agree that Powell has managed to avoid a lot of scrutiny with respect to the invasion of Iraq.
