Klaus
Refugee
sorry double posting
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And the UN security council has still approved that Blix should search for WMDs in Iraq. There was no new decision in the council that this is search has become obsolete.
STING2 said:Just because the world feels that America is arrogant does not mean that is so. I find the administration position to be logical considering that there seems to be certain countries in the United Nations who don't want the USA to find WMD or perhaps documents or material that may implicate their country.
You have refused to tell what "real" coalition would be, so I see nothing wrong with the fact that there are 3 countries on the ground conducting the legitimate military operation as called for by the UN resolutions. This operation is not over. The French and Germans and anyone else had an oportunity to participate, but instead did their best diplomatically to prevent disarmament of Iraq and the end of the Saddam regime.
I don't want countries that have different motives to compromise what my friends and others have accomplished and sacrificed to achieve. It is not arrogance but a matter of national security.
Bush Says It Will Take Time to Find Iraq's Banned Arms
By DAVID E. SANGER
RAWFORD, Tex., May 3 ? With his administration under growing international pressure to find evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons, President Bush told reporters today that "we'll find them," but cautioned that it would take some time because, he said, Mr. Hussein spent so many years hiding his stockpiles.
Mr. Bush's comments came after his senior aides, in interviews in recent days, had begun to back away from their prewar claims that Mr. Hussein had an arsenal that was loaded and ready to fire. They now contend that he developed what they call a "just in time" production strategy for his weapons, hiding chemical precursors that could be quickly loaded into empty artillery shells or short-range missiles.
But no evidence has been found that he did so, and Mr. Bush's comments reflected a growing concern in the administration that opponents of the war would claim that the United States exaggerated the evidence against Iraq in order to justify an attack that was intended to depose Mr. Hussein.
Referring to the growing number of Iraqi scientists and military officials now in custody, the president made it clear that he thought they would soon lead American forces to Mr. Hussein's weapons stores. "It may not be the aces, kings and queens and jacks that do the talking," he said, referring to the Iraqi officials whose faces have been placed on playing cards to help allied troops identify them. "It may be those carrying the water for the aces, kings, queens and jacks."
Speaking on his ranch this morning with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, Mr. Bush appeared still ebullient after his two-day swing through California. On the trip, he declared an end to the military phase of the war in a made-for-television speech to the 5,000 crew members of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln off shore in the Pacific.
His aides describe that speech on Thursday as one of the best-staged events of his presidency. They are already discussing how clips of Mr. Bush in a flight jump suit, surrounded by returning troops, can be used in the 2004 re-election campaign....
STING2 said:"Your comment about countries not wanting to find WMD is baseless."
My comment is based on the fact that many countries in the UN were unwilling to do what was necessary to insure that Iraq no longer had WMD. The only way to do that after 12 years of failure, was through military force.
Most of the WMD that was found in the 1990s was found because of those that escaped Iraq and were able to provide what information they knew. Then Saddam had to agree to give them up and not prevent the inspectors from finding and destroying them. At any moment, a single platoon of Republican guard units could put the work of the UN inspectors to a hault. Thats something that does not happen now because the Republican Guard no longer exists. Saddam's goal in the 1990s was to turn over a certain portion of his WMD in order to full the world that he had complied 100% there by getting sanctions lifted. Saddam never had any intent of complying which is why peaceful UN inspections could never work, as 12 years of these games proved. Only through military force, can an uncooperative dictator with a large military, be disarmed of WMD he is unwilling to give up and is ready to fight for.
"Three English-speaking countries does not represent a credible coalition for this kind of operation."
Because their English speaking?
"The French and Germans did participate in the operation of disarming Iraq. However, they did not consider a war a necessary option at that moment. But with their commitment to disarmament they should not be suddenly sidelined by a government who might do everything to prove the world that there were WMD."
The French and the Germans were committed to a plan that had failed to disarm Iraq after 12 years! They were committed to a plan that was a failure. The only reason one would pursue a path of failure is ignorance or the fact that they do not desire the goal.
The US governments goal is not to prove that there are WMDs but to insure that Iraq has no WMDs.
Colin Powell has already correctly stated that it was "not incubment upon the USA to prove that Iraq had WMDs, it was incubment upon Iraq to prove that they did not have WMDs. Thats what Iraq agreed to in the 1991 Gulf War ceacefire agreement.
The USA has done more for the security and stability of the Gulf Region and the rest of the world then the United Nations has done in its entire history.
The USA cares deeply for the security of YOUR country. Thousands of US soldiers died and suffered for it. Billions were spent during the Cold War to prevent Soviet tanks from rolling through it, or turning it into a nuclear waste land.
New York Times, May 6, 2003
Missing in Action: Truth
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
When I raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at me. The gist was: "You *&#*! Who cares if we never find weapons of mass destruction, because we've liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant."
But it does matter, enormously, for American credibility. After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.: "That is what this war was about."
I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world.
Let's fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don't want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit.
Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.
I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.
The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted ? except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.
"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.
Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public.
Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again."
"In this administration, the pressure to get product `right' is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]," Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem. "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome," he said.
"The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated," Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated."
The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan's policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom.
Headache in a Suitcase said:pre liberation...
let's give the inspecters more time! let's give the inspecters more time! give them months if they need it! years even! give the inspecters more time!
post libertation...
we want answers now! where are they?! where are they?! where are they?! you don't need any more time! we want answers now!
Headache in a Suitcase said:pre liberation...
let's give the inspecters more time! let's give the inspecters more time! give them months if they need it! years even! give the inspecters more time!
post libertation...
we want answers now! where are they?! where are they?! where are they?! you don't need any more time! we want answers now!
FizzingWhizzbees said:
I think there are really two reasons for that:
Firstly, the claim before the war was that weapons inspectors had been unsuccessful because of obstruction by Iraqi officials. After the war those officials are presumably no longer able to interfere in inspections, so that explanation no longer holds water.
Secondly, the US and UK claimed to have evidence before the war of the existence of weapons of mass destruction and where they could be found. Therefore it seems somewhat suspicious that after the war they're unable to put this knowledge into practice and find the weapons quickly.
they claimed to have evidence of their existance, not of their exact location. if they knew where they could be found, one would think they would have told somebody that.