Failure Finding Iraqi WMDs - or would Powell have supported this war if he'd knew...

[Klaus]

From New York Times OP/Ed

The Failure to Find Iraqi Weapons
Published: September 26, 2003

This page did not support the war in Iraq, but it never quarreled with one of its basic premises. Like President Bush, we believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding potentially large quantities of chemical and biological weapons and aggressively pursuing nuclear arms. Like the president, we thought those weapons posed a grave danger to the United States and the rest of the world. Now it appears that premise was wrong. We cannot in hindsight blame the administration for its original conclusions. They were based on the best intelligence available, which had led the Clinton administration before it and the governments of allied nations to reach the same conclusion. But even the best intelligence can turn out to be mistaken, and the likelihood that this was the case in Iraq shows why pre-emptive war, the Bush administration's strategy since 9/11, is so ill conceived as a foundation for security policy. If intelligence and risk assessment are sketchy ? and when are they not? ? using them as the basis for pre-emptive war poses enormous dangers.

A draft of an interim report by David Kay, the American leading the hunt for banned arms in Iraq, says the team has not found any such weapons after nearly four months of intensively searching and interviewing top Iraqi scientists. There is some evidence of chemicals and equipment that could have been put to illicit use. But, to the chagrin of Mr. Bush's top lieutenants, there is nothing more.

It remains remotely possible, of course, that something will be found. But Mr. Kay's draft suggests that the weapons are simply not there. Why Mr. Hussein did not prove that when the United Nations demanded an explanation remains a puzzle. His failure to come clean strengthened the conviction that he had a great deal to hide. His history as a vicious tyrant who had used chemical weapons in war and against his own people lent credence to the fear that he could not be trusted with whatever he was holding and would pose a significant threat.

Before the war, we objected not to the stated goal of disarming Iraq but to the fact that the United States was waging war essentially alone, in defiance of many important allies. We favored using international inspectors to keep Iraq's destructive programs in check while diplomats forged a United Nations effort to force Mr. Hussein to yield his weapons.

The policy of pre-emption that Mr. Bush pursued instead junked an approach that had served this country and the world well for half a century. That policy, simply stated, was that the United States would respond quickly to aggression but would not be the first to attack.

The world changed on Sept. 11, 2001. Terrorist groups like Al Qaeda are dedicated to inflicting maximum harm on this country. Since such groups rely on suicide bombers and are therefore immune to threats of retaliation, the United States is right to attack a terrorist group first in some circumstances. It was certainly justified in its war in Afghanistan, which had become little more than a government-sponsored training camp for Al Qaeda. It is quite another thing, however, to launch a pre-emptive military campaign against a nation that the United States suspects poses a threat.

Americans and others in the world are glad that Mr. Hussein has been removed from power. If Iraq can be turned into a freer and happier country in coming years, it could become a focal point for the evolution of a more peaceful and democratic Middle East. But it was the fear of weapons of mass destruction placed in the hands of enemy terrorists that made doing something about Iraq seem urgent. If it had seemed unlikely that Mr. Hussein had them, we doubt that Congress or the American people would have endorsed the war.

This is clearly an uncomfortable question for the Bush administration. Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Times editors. Asked whether Americans would have supported this war if weapons of mass destruction had not been at issue, Mr. Powell said the question was too hypothetical to answer. Asked if he, personally, would have supported it, he smiled, thrust his hand out and said, "It was good to meet you."

 

[pub crawler]

I disagree with a number of the author's conclusions. Primarily, I am skeptical, highly skeptical of the author's assertion that, with regard to WMD's, "to the chagrin of Mr. Bush's top lieutenants, there is nothing more."

If anyone saw Fox News' Brit Hume's interview with President Bush this week, then you know that Bush is not folding his cards.

This administration will find enough evidence to satisfy their needs. Bank on it.

 

[STING2]

It is not incumbent on the USA or any other member state of the UN to prove or show that Saddam's regime has WMD, it is incumbent upon Saddam to prove that he no longer has WMD! That is the way the 1991 Gulf Ceacefire Agreement was written. In addition, resolutions 678, 687, and 1441 all authorize the use of force to disarm Saddam if Saddam fails to VERIFIABLY DISARM ITSELF!

The legal justification for war is solid because it is not based on any material found but on Saddam's failure to VERIFIABLY DISARM.

Saddam has yet to account for 30,000 Bio/Chem shells, thousands of liters of Anthrax, hundreds of pounds of Mustard Gas. The failure to account for and verfiably disarm of this material that Saddam possessed as late as November 1998 according to UN inspecters, is all that is needed to authorize the use of military force to bring about compliance.

Much of the material is most likely buried deeply in the Iraqi desert with those that did the burial itself later shot by Saddam leaving only a handful of people knowing the location. If this is indeed the case, inspectors will have just as good a chance of finding more ancient ruins near Babylon as they will the material.

 

[pub crawler]

Much of the material is most likely buried deeply in the Iraqi desert with those that did the burial itself later shot by Saddam leaving only a handful of people knowing the location. If this is indeed the case, inspectors will have just as good a chance of finding more ancient ruins near Babylon as they will the material.

Don't bet on that, Sting. Your boy will produce the goods. To the extent he needs to produce the goods, anyway.

 

[Klaus]

The interesting part of the above article for me was:

Powell didn't say "Of course i would have supported it, we fought for the liberation of the supressed people - he didn't answer!

 

[STING2]

Pub Crawler,

"To the extent he needs to produce the goods, anyway."

I remind you that the only one required by international to produce anything is Saddam Hussein.

 

[pub crawler]

Sting, thank you for the reminder.

 

[deep]

I remind you that the only one required by international to produce anything is Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. was sure Saddam had WMD, but Iraqi scientists tell TIME the weapons were destroyed long before the war


By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL WARE I BAGHDAD

The trader was actually sitting at home in Baghdad, waiting. He knew it was only a matter of time before the Americans came. It was just after curfew on the night of June 22, ten weeks after Saddam Hussein's fall, when he heard a helicopter overhead, the humvees in the street outside, the knock at the door. U.S. soldiers came rushing into the house, broke his bed, searched everywhere, then put a blindfold on him and drove him away.

He knew they would come because he knew what they were looking for. He had worked for the import section of Iraq's powerful Military Industrialization Commission (MIC), essentially the state's weapons-making organ, which owned hundreds of factories, research centers?everything you needed if you wanted to build an arsenal of chemical or biological weapons. He spent much of his time in the 1980s buying tons of growth medium, which scientists use to cultivate germs. "We were like traders." he says. "The scientists would tell us what they wanted, and we got it." After Gulf War I, he entertained a steady stream of U.N. weapons inspectors wanting to know what had happened to all that growth medium, how had it been used, what was left.

But there wasn't much he could tell them, not that he could prove, at least. Just before the war, he recalls, the chiefs at the mic had told people like him involved in the weapons program to hand over some of their documents and burn the rest. "They didn't realize at that time the Americans would insist on every single document," he says. "They thought the (U.S.) attacks would come and that would be it." When in the years after the war U.N. inspectors kept demanding a paper trail, the superiors got nervous. They "started asking us for the documents they had told us to destroy. They were desperate. They even offered to buy any documents we may have hidden."

Ten years and another war later, a new set of interrogators is wondering what happened to Iraq's bioweapons program. On the night of his arrest, the Americans took him to a detention center at the airport, where he was kept in a cell alone, given plenty of water and military rations. Two pairs of Western interrogators took turns asking questions, sometimes through a translator, sometimes directly in English or Arabic. "They asked me about the importation of things like chemicals and about people sent abroad for special missions. The essence of it was, Are there any wmd?" They particularly focused on the period after 1998, when U.N. inspectors left Iraq. "Could any trade have happened without my knowledge within the mic, not just my section?" The buyer says he had nothing of interest to tell the interrogators; his group, he insists, had long ago quit the weapons-of-mass-destruction business. As they pressed him about what he purchased and for whom, it seemed to him that "it was just like the blind man clutching for someone's hand to hold." After three days he was blindfolded, taken back into the city and released.

The trader's story offers a glimpse into the challenges faced by David Kay, a co-head of the Iraq Survey Group, charged by the cia with finding the wmd the Bush Administration insists Iraq has. Kay is expected to release a status report on his findings soon, possibly this week. While stressing that the account will not be the Survey Group's final word, cia spokesman Bill Harlow allows that it "won't rule anything in or out." That remark seems a tacit acknowledgment that the U.S., after nearly six months of searching, has yet to find definitive evidence that Saddam truly posed the kind of threat the White House described in selling the war.

Bush Administration officials never anticipated this predicament. They expected that wmd arsenals would be uncovered quickly once the U.S. occupied Iraq. Since then, Iraq has been scoured, and nearly every top weapons scientist has been captured or interviewed. That the investigators have found no hidden stockpiles of VX gas or anthrax or intact gas centrifuges suggests that it may be time to at least entertain the possibility that Iraqi officials all along were telling the truth when they said they no longer had a wmd program.

Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed Iraqi weapons scientists, middlemen and former government officials. Saddam's henchmen all make essentially the same claim: that Iraq's once massive unconventional-weapons program was destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt; that officials destroyed or never kept the documents that would prove it; that the shell games Saddam played with U.N. inspectors were designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons systems?missiles, air defenses, radar?not biological or chemical programs; and that even Saddam, a sucker for a new gadget or invention or toxin, may not have known what he actually had or, more to the point, didn't have. It would be an irony almost too much to bear to consider that he doomed his country to war because he was intent on protecting weapons systems that didn't exist in the first place.

These tales are tempting to dismiss as scripts recited by practiced liars who had been deceiving the world community for years. These sources may still be too frightened of the possibility of Saddam's return to power to tell his secrets. Or it could be that Saddam reconstituted an illicit weapons program with such secrecy that those who knew of past efforts were left out of the loop. But the unanimity of these sources' accounts can't be easily dismissed and at the very least underscores the difficulty the U.S. has in proving its case that Saddam was hoarding unconventional arms.

Iraqi engineering professor Nabil al-Rawi remembers being at a conference in Beirut on Feb. 5 and watching on TV as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell made a presentation to the U.N. laying out the U.S. case that Iraq was pressing ahead with its weapons programs. Conference participants from other Arab countries grilled al-Rawi whether Powell's charges were true. An exasperated al-Rawi tried to reassure his counterparts that he and his teams had abandoned their illegal programs years earlier. Did they believe him? "I don't think so," he says.

Al-Rawi contends that he had been around long enough to know what was what. He had worked on the Iraqi nuclear program before the 1991 war and until the fall of the regime was a senior member of the mic. He and a nuclear engineer whom TIME interviewed claim that the nuclear-weapons program was not resumed after the plants were destroyed by the U.S. in Gulf War I. In his more recent work at the mic, al-Rawi had a perspective on the biological and chemical programs as well. Those too, he insists, were shut down in the early 1990s; the scientists transferred to conventional military projects or civilian work. Last November, al-Rawi says, he was asked by Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huweish, head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, to give a seminar?essentially career counseling?to mic scientists "on ways to attract funding for and shape new research projects because there was no weapons work for them."

Sa'ad Abd al-Kahar al-Rawi, a relation of Nabil's, also thinks he would have known had Baghdad revived its wmd efforts. A professor of economics, he was a top financial adviser to the regime and knew the government books well. He says he would have known if money was disappearing into a black hole created by a special weapons project. Similarly, Iraqi scientists note that their community is small and tightly knit; most of them studied together and worked together. If a new, secret wmd program had started up, they argue, certain core players who held the necessary expertise would have had to be involved. Several scientists told TIME that all their cohort is accounted for; no one went underground. Iraq's premier scientists, according to Nabil al-Rawi, moved on to other things?teaching, water and power projects, producing generic Viagra.

Many did continue developing military technology. After 1991 Nabil al-Rawi worked on electrical controls for unmanned drones and, most recently, Stealth bomber-detection radar. Such projects were meant to be hidden from U.N. inspectors, who, the Iraqis have long asserted, were riddled with American spies. The Furat facility just south of Baghdad was a known nuclear site before the first Gulf War. Last fall the White House released satellite photos showing a new building at the site and suggested it was designed for covert nuclear research. But al-Rawi claims it was rebuilt to produce radar and antiaircraft systems. When TIME visited the plant this summer, there were signs of heavy bombing, but the new building was intact?and carpeted inside with documents in French, Russian, Arabic and English, all having to do with radar equipment, frequencies and trajectories.

In his U.N. presentation, powell asserted that the Tariq State Establishment in Fallujah was designed to develop chemical weapons. When TIME visited the site, it was empty. U.N. inspectors visited the facility six times from December 2002 to January 2003 and reported that the chlorine plant that so concerned the Americans "is currently inoperative." Nabil al-Rawi says the hundreds of scientists who worked there are now "doing other things." Another site mentioned by the allies in the walk-up to the war was the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, which both British intelligence and the cia suspected was part of a biological-warfare program.

TIME visited the site in July to see the two recently built warehouses that had raised those concerns. One had been bombed, its door cascading with a mountain of debris made up of burned and broken empty vials. The intact other building was packed to the rafters with boxes full of glassware and beakers. Pigeons roost in the ceiling, their droppings and feathers?some of it inches thick?caking the cardboard towers. Nothing appears to have been moved in a long time. U.S. intelligence officials declined to tell TIME about Washington's postwar assessment of the site.

So, why all the hide and seek if suspect facilities did not contain incriminating evidence? The former Minister of Industry and Minerals, Muyassar Raja Shalah, cites national security: "The U.N.'s accusations about hiding things were true," he says, recalling charges that Iraqis hustled evidence out the back door even as U.N. inspectors entered through the front. "This was Iraq's right, because the U.N. was searching for wmd in a lot of military facilities, and of course we held a lot of military secrets relating to the national security of Iraq in these places. It was impossible to let a foreigner have a look at these secrets."

Some analysts suspect that Saddam's game was a sly form of deterrence: keep the U.S. and his neighbors guessing about the extent of his arsenal to prevent a pre-emptive attack. A bluff like that had worked for him before: in 1991, during an uprising among Iraqi Kurds in Kirkuk, soldiers inside helicopters dropped a harmless white powder onto the rebels below, terrifying them into thinking it was a chemical attack. The Kurds retreated, and the uprising collapsed. Hans Blix, head of the U.N. inspection team that entered Iraq last November and left just before the war, told Australian national radio two weeks ago that "you can put up a sign on your door, beware of the dog, without having a dog."

Pentagon officials were so certain before Gulf War II that the Iraqis had outfitted their forces with chemical weapons that U.S. soldiers storming toward Baghdad wore their hot, heavy chemical weapons gear, just in case. But a captain in Iraq's Special Security Organization, the agency that was responsible for, among other things, the security of weapons sites, says no such arms were available. "Trust me," he says, his eyes narrowed, as he sits in a back-alley teahouse in Tikrit, "if we had them, we would have used them, especially in the battle for the airport. We wanted them but didn't have any."

Colonel Ali Jaffar Hussan al-Duri, a Republican Guard armored-corps commander who fought in the Iran-Iraq war and in both Gulf Wars, remembers the time when Iraq's Chemical Corps was fear inspiring. "We were much better at it than the Iranians," he says, who are thought to have suffered as many as 80,000 casualties in chemical attacks. But after Gulf War I, Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, who headed the mic, took the most talented Chemical Corps officers with him, according to Hussan. After that, he claims, the unit became a joke. "It should have been a sensitive unit?it once was?but in the end that's where we dumped our worst soldiers." Comments a Republican Guard major of the Corps: "It had nothing."

If that's true, what happened to the banned weapons Iraq once possessed? In the inspections regime that lasted from 1991 to 1998, the U.N. oversaw the destruction of large stores of illicit arms. Some documented inventories, however, were never satisfactorily accounted for; these included tons of chemical agents as well as stores of anthrax and VX poison. The Iraqis eventually owned up to producing these supplies but insisted that they had disposed of much of them in 1991 when no one was looking and had kept no records of the destruction. That made Blix wonder. In an interview with TIME in February, he described Iraq as "one of the best-organized regimes in the Arab world" and noted "when they have had need of something to show, then they have been able to do so."

A former mic official insists that this view is mistaken. "In Iraq we don't write everything," he says. The claim that Saddam would destroy his most dangerous weapons of his own accord and not retain the means to prove it seems a stretch. But a captain in the Mukhabarat, the main Iraqi intelligence service, says he was a witness to just such an exercise. In July 1991, he says, he traveled into the Nibai desert in a caravan of trucks carrying 25 missiles loaded with biological agents. First the bulldozers took a week to bury them. It took three more weeks to evacuate the area. Then the missiles were exploded. No one kept any kind of documentation, the captain says. "We just did it." This meant that when weapons inspectors came demanding verification, the Iraqis could not prove what or how much had been destroyed.

Sa'ad al-rawi contends that the men who carried out such missions were junior level, sergeants and first sergeants. "They are not educated men," he says. "You order them to do something, they do it. When we had to try to account for this, we tried to recall them in 1997, but many had of course left the army and were hard to find. And the ones we did find certainly couldn't remember exactly how many missiles were buried, nor what was in each of them."

That still leaves unanswered why the Iraqis would have unilaterally destroyed their most potent arms. One theory, advanced by the U.N., is that the regime used these exercises as a cover for retaining a fraction of their stores. The idea is that they would destroy quantities of weapons (creating a disposal site and eyewitnesses, if not written records) and claim to have got rid of everything yet actually hold on to some of it. The Mukhabarat captain concedes that scientists kept small amounts of VX and mustard gas for future experiments. "I saw it myself, several times," he says.

Samir, a chemicals expert who worked for a branch of the mic called the National Monitoring Directorate, says he knows of a case in which 14 artillery shells filled with mustard gas were preserved out of a batch of 250 slated for destruction. The main purpose of keeping them, he says, was to test their deterioration over time. The Iraqis handed over the shells to the U.N. in 1997, claiming that they had been mis-stored and recently discovered, an explanation Samir says was a ruse. When four of the shells were unsealed, tests found their contents to be 97% pure. "The gas was perfect," says Samir.

Even if the Iraqis did destroy most of their illegal weaponry in 1991, that does not mean they didn't build up new stores. The notion that the bioweapons program wound down in the 1990s is flatly rejected by Richard Spertzel, who led the U.N. hunt for biological weapons inside Iraq from 1994 to 1998. "We were developing pretty good evidence of a continuing program in '97 and '98," he says. Some U.N. inspectors, disagree, saying they believe that there was no further production after 1991. Spertzel says an Iraqi scientist phoned him just this past April and told him an "edict" went out from Saddam shortly before the war ordering his biological-weapons teams to destroy any remaining germ stockpiles.

That Saddam would have continued feverishly pursuing weapons of every kind seems more in keeping with his character than the idea that he gave up on them. The Iraqi dictator was crazy for weapons, fascinated by every new invention?and as a result was easily conned by salesmen and officials offering the latest device. Saddam apparently had high hopes for a bogus product called red mercury, touted as an ingredient for a handheld nuclear device. Large quantities of the gelatinous red liquid were looted from Iraqi stores after the war and are now being offered on the black market.

Saddam's underlings appear to have invented weapons programs and fabricated experiments to keep the funding coming. The Mukhabarat captain says the scamming went all the way to the top of the mic to its director, Huweish, who would appease Saddam with every report, never telling him the truth about failures or production levels and meanwhile siphoning money from projects. "He would tell the President he had invented a new missile for Stealth bombers but hadn't. So Saddam would say, 'Make 20 missiles.' He would make one and put the rest in his pocket," says the captain. Colonel Hussan al-Duri, who spent several years in the 1990s as an air-defense inspector, saw similar cons. "Some projects were just stealing money," he says. A scientist or officer would say he needed $10 million to build a special weapon. "They would produce great reports, but there was never anything behind them."

If Saddam may not have known the true nature of his own arsenal, it is no wonder that Western intelligence services were picking up so many clues about so many weapons systems. But it helps answer one logical argument that the Administration has been making ever since the weapons failed to appear after the war ended: why, if Saddam had nothing to hide, did he endure billions of dollars in sanctions and ultimately prompt his own destruction? Perhaps because even he was mistaken about what was really at stake in this fight.

Whether the Iraqis had actual stores of unconventional weapons, Spertzel argues, is beside the point. He finds it credible that Iraq converted many of its weapons factories to civilian uses. Baghdad's official policy from 1995, he notes, was that facilities that were not building weapons had to be self-supporting. But, he adds, "they would be available when called upon" to return to armsmaking. Spertzel thinks the focus on finding a 55-gal. drum of poison is misplaced. "The concern that many of us always had was not that they were producing great quantities of stuff but that the program was continuing?they were refining techniques and making a better product. That's all part of an offensive program." Absent a smoking gun, the Administration may have to fall back on means and motive. That's always, however, a tougher case to prove.

?With reporting by Mark Thompson and Timothy J. Burger/Washington

 

[STING2]

Its very simple.

The terms of the 1991 Gulf War Ceacefire in March stated that Saddam must VERIFIABLY DISARM of all WMD material and related programs. Failure to do so would be a material breech of the ceacefire agreements and multiple resolutions. Resolutions 678, 687, and 1441 authorize member states to use all means necessary to bring Saddam into compliance. As of March 2003, 12 years after the 1991 Gulf War Ceacefire, Saddam had failed to comply with any of the 17 UN resolutions passed under chapter VII rules of the United Nations and was in open violation of the Ceacefire agreement.

Verifiable disarmament is Saddam's responsibility, not any member of the UN. The consequences of failing to do so were perfectly laid out. No appology or excuse made for Saddam, on this particular issue, will ever change that.

 

[Rono]

Its very simple.

The terms of the 1991 Gulf War Ceacefire in March stated that Saddam must VERIFIABLY DISARM of all WMD material and related programs. Failure to do so would be a material breech of the ceacefire agreements and multiple resolutions. Resolutions 678, 687, and 1441 authorize member states to use all means necessary to bring Saddam into compliance. As of March 2003, 12 years after the 1991 Gulf War Ceacefire, Saddam had failed to comply with any of the 17 UN resolutions passed under chapter VII rules of the United Nations and was in open violation of the Ceacefire agreement.

Verifiable disarmament is Saddam's responsibility, not any member of the UN. The consequences of failing to do so were perfectly laid out. No appology or excuse made for Saddam, on this particular issue, will ever change that.

After 12 Years we decided to bomb for the glorie of one country,...in the name of peace. god and oil.

And be sillent about resolutions,.....or bomb Israel.

 

[Basstrap]

Continually bringing up those resolutions doesn't do/prove ANYTHING and I hope I never see them again in this forum

I don't think war should be waged on if's...yes, there was no verifying evidence they were disarmed...but there was no strong evidence to say they hadn;t...and that isn't good enough for war

yes..saddam was a murderous bastard...but so are scores of other tyrants worldwide and in the past who are and were not bombed to hell.

 

[STING2]

RONO,

"After 12 Years we decided to bomb for the glorie of one country,...in the name of peace. god and oil."

Thats not so, Iraq failed to comply with Security Council Resolutions passed under Chapter VII rules of the United Nations. Resolutions 678, 687, 1441 authorized the use of force if Saddam failed to comply.

"And be sillent about resolutions,.....or bomb Israel."

#1 Israel is not in violation of any UN resolutions passed under CHAPTER VII RULES OF THE UNITED NATIONS. For any UN resolution to be enforced with military power, it must have been passed under Chapter VII rules. Resolutions passed against Israel have been passed under CHAPTER VI rules of the United Nations. Chapter VI rules only allow for enforcement through a negotiated settlement.

 

[STING2]

Basstrap,

"Continually bringing up those resolutions doesn't do/prove ANYTHING and I hope I never see them again in this forum"

The resolutions are the central basis and the legal basis for war against Iraq by member states of the UN.

They are also part of MY opinion on the basis for military action against Saddam.


"I don't think war should be waged on if's...yes, there was no verifying evidence they were disarmed...but there was no strong evidence to say they hadn;t...and that isn't good enough for war"

The conditions of the 1991 Gulf War Ceacefire Agreement state that Saddam must VERIFIABLY DISARM of all WMD materials and programs. That means that any WMD that is destroyed or rendered ineffective must be verified by UN inspectors. Failure to do so in any case is a violation of the Ceacefire Agreement under which the member states of the UN are authorized by multiple resolutions to use all means necessary to bring about compliance. Saddam has failed to account for 30,000 Bio/Chem shells, thousands of liters of Anthrax, and hundreds of pounds of mustard gas among other things. For Saddam to be in compliance, destruction of this material must be verified by the UN inspectors. Saddam has never shown this material was destroyed or if not destroyed, where it is?

There is not just strong evidence that Saddam has not verifiably destroyed and given up his WMD, it is a solid fact. Saddam has never under UN supervision destroyed, or handed over, 30,000 Bio/Chem shells, thousands of liters of Anthrax, and hundreds of pounds of Mustard Gas. The failure to do this a violation of the 1991 Ceacefire Agreement and a Violation of resolutions 678, 687, and 1441, all of which authorize the "use of all mean necessary" to bring about compliance. The case for military action is rock solid. People opposed should have been raising hell back in 1990/1991 when the resolutions and ceacefire agreement were passed.

"yes..saddam was a murderous bastard...but so are scores of other tyrants worldwide and in the past who are and were not bombed to hell."

I suggest you read the Threatening Storm by Kenneth Pollack. It explains why Saddam is far from just and ordinary murderous bastard.

No other dictator has used WMD more times than Saddam. No other Dictator in the Middle East has killed 1.7 million people. No other Dictator has threatened Global energy supplies and there for Global economic stability in the way Saddam has. Saddam's actions over the past 20 years, the unprovoked invasions and attacks of 4 different independent countries is unique and unparalled over the past 20 years. Saddam's behavior, past and present capabilities, proximity to a vital region of the planet, and failure to comply with the most serious of UN resolutions passed against make Saddam a threat unlike anything else from other leaders of States in the world.

 

[Rono]

I do not fucking care about the US and UN after the WMD porno picture show of hard evidence presented by Powell,...170 days, 1200 men and 300 million dollars later there is nothing serious found in Iraq. Where is that goddamn prove ? The US Used the UN for thier personal reasons,....

 

[STING2]

"I do not fucking care about the US and UN after the WMD porno picture show of hard evidence presented by Powell,...170 days, 1200 men and 300 million dollars later there is nothing serious found in Iraq. Where is that goddamn prove ? The US Used the UN for thier personal reasons,...."

It does not matter if the coalition finds anything in Iraq at all. It has no effect on the justification for military action. The Justification for military action is based on Saddam's failure to VERIFIABLY DISARM! Saddam never did that! It was the chief requirement of the 1991 UN Ceacefire Agreement. Its not incumbent upon the coalition to prove anything! The only one that had to prove something was Saddam! Because Saddam never accounted for where the 30,000 Bio/Chem shells, thousands of liters of Anthrax, and hundreds of pounds of mustard gas that Saddam was documented as having by United Nations Weapons inspectors, the justification for military action is rock solid.

 

[BVS]

I'm sure it matters to the parents, spouses, and children who lost a child, spouse, or parent. I'm sure it matters to them knowing their loved one may have died under false pretences. What are you going to do send they copy of the resolutions, I'm sure that will help them sleep better at night.

Maybe by your interpretation of the resolutions it made this war legal despite any proof of what we had been sold, but does it make it right? Just because something may be legal still doesn't qualify doing it.

 

[FizzingWhizzbees]

Even if you believe the war was legal, it doesn't mean it was right. There are many things that aren't against the law, but are immoral all the same.

 

[nbcrusader]

Even if you believe the war was legal, it doesn't mean it was right. There are many things that aren't against the law, but are immoral all the same.

That raises a larger and more difficult question - is it immoral to stand by while a dictator or rebel groups kills off a segment of the population? Saddam was only the latest in a long line.

 

[STING2]

BonoVoxSupastar,

"I'm sure it matters to the parents, spouses, and children who lost a child, spouse, or parent. I'm sure it matters to them knowing their loved one may have died under false pretences. What are you going to do send they copy of the resolutions, I'm sure that will help them sleep better at night."

Thats the whole point, there never was any false pretence. The resolutions and the fact that the USA and other nations would have to enforce them with military force if Saddam failed to comply is a FACT that has been known since the Ceacefire Agreement was signed back in March 1991. The international community in March 1991 decided that Saddam must give up all his WMD and passed resolutions specifically under Chapter VII rules so military force could be used to enforce the resolutions if Saddam failed to comply.

I have a several good friends that fought in this war and served in the country afterwards. Several of them saw exstensive combat. These are friends I have had since Grade School. They are like brothers to me. I've thought very long and hard about this conflict and I have dear loved ones that have fought in it. Both them and I agreed that this war was a Just one.

"Maybe by your interpretation of the resolutions it made this war legal despite any proof of what we had been sold, but does it make it right?"

Could you please tell me which resolution specifically said it was incumbent upon on member states of the UN to prove that Iraq had WMD? There is nothing in the Resolutions and Ceacefire Agreement which says member states have to prove anything. The conduct that is being judged and watched is that of the violator, Saddam. He was the one following his invasion of Kuwait, that was required to give up all WMD.

"Just because something may be legal still doesn't qualify doing it."

The Moral Justification for the war is in someways even more compelling than the legal and security arguement.

 

[anitram]

That raises a larger and more difficult question - is it immoral to stand by while a dictator or rebel groups kills off a segment of the population? Saddam was only the latest in a long line.

Yes, it's immoral. We're not liberating many people around the world, are we?

I also find it immoral to now claim that this was the primary motivating factor in fighting the war. That's revisionist history. The moral thing would be not having had anything to do with him 20 years ago, either, but I suppose he was no longer useful to us.

 

[BVS]

Yes, it's immoral. We're not liberating many people around the world, are we?

I also find it immoral to now claim that this was the primary motivating factor in fighting the war. That's revisionist history. The moral thing would be not having had anything to do with him 20 years ago, either, but I suppose he was no longer useful to us.

Yes, thank you.

 

[Rono]

Sting, Maybe we should give you the deathpenalty and look for evidence later,...

 

[deep]

Sting, Maybe we should give you the deathpenalty and look for evidence later,...

but if we don't find the evidence
that does not mean there is no evidence.

 

[STING2]

Rono,

Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990. The United Nations passed multiple resolutions against Iraq because of this including Resolution 678 which authorized member states to remove Iraq from Kuwait and to use all means necessary to bring about compliance with current and subsequent UN resolutions. Resolution 687 following the Gulf War reaffirmed resolution 678 and laid down a number of conditions for Saddam to follow including 100% disarmament of all WMD. Saddam was required to VERIFIABLY DISARM of all WMD. Failure to do so was a violation of the Ceacefire agreement and multiple UN resolutions. It was Saddam's responsibility to prove he had fully disarmed of all WMD. He was required to do this in a way that was verifiable by the UN inspectors. Again, failure to do this was a violation of the agreements under which member states of the UN were authorized to take military action. Member States of the UN were never required to prove anything. This is how the Ceacefire Agreement was written and Saddam signed it and agreed to the conditions.

"Sting, Maybe we should give you the deathpenalty and look for evidence later,..."

Again, Saddam invaded Kuwait and the international passed a large number of resolutions against Saddam because of that action. If you believe Saddam never invaded Kuwait, never fired Scud Missiles at Israel, never attacked Saudi Arabia, never used WMD, never had WMD then you might have a case. But these things were the evidence, the evidence that allowed the international community to lay down certain conditions and penalties for the above violations. Saddam was guilty, and part of his sentence was 100% total disarmament of WMD. VERIFIABLE DISARMAMENT! Failure to do so, is no different than a mass murderer who escapes from prison and could potentially harm the public at any moment.

 

[Rono]

I refuse to justify the war by using 12 years old paperwork,...Powell used shit evidence to bring the world in war hunger.

And if Saddam was able to verify that distruction of WDM`s it would not make any difference. The USA would not believe itanyway and the pre emptive attack was already planned years ago.

 

[STING2]

Rono,

"I refuse to justify the war by using 12 years old paperwork,...Powell used shit evidence to bring the world in war hunger."

Age is not a factor, these are requirments. Can a prisoner claim a law or sentence is not longer relevant because it happened 10 years ago? In any event, Resolution 1441 was passed in November 2002, so its not even a year old. The Authorization to use military force had already been given before Powells speach to the UN, regardless of what you think of the evidence. What is shit, is SADDAM's reasoning for being clean and not being able to verify it. Why do so many people defend this guy in regards to his serious violations on WMD?

"The USA would not believe itanyway and the pre emptive attack was already planned years ago."

Of course it was. It would be Stupid to require Saddam to comply with certain resolutions but not have any plan in place to enforce it if Saddam failed to comply.

Saddam's compliance would have made a difference. Notice the USA and other member states did not take military action for 12 years. They tried everything to work with Saddam to bring about compliance, but Saddam was not really interested in complying.

 

[Klaus]

In most law systems it's illegal to punish people for things which have bin done 10 or 15 years before.
I don't think that this is also true for international law but it might be the reason why - even if people follow your argumentation and even if they ignore the fact that now the UN would have the control over the country and not the US if it was a operation under UN rules - it just dosn't feel like the justice we are used to

Klaus

 

[STING2]

Klaus,

But this is not a punishment for something done 10 or 15 years ago but rather a requirment just like one who must pay a fine or serve a jail sentence except this is far more serious than both. It is unbelievable to me, that people would defend Saddam on this and pretend that simply the passing of 12 years makes certain resolutions irrellevent. Rather, time is irrellevent to the resolutions. The requirements remain regardless of the passage of time. I know Saddam thinks differently. Any society that would let a man like Saddam wiggle out of his requirements risk suffering the same fate that Europeans did decades ago.

 

[Klaus]

We allways have to remember that our enemies will interpret international law in the future like the US did it in that case and like Israel think it can do a few hours ago.

Why do you think Mr. Powell didn't praise the liberation of the Iraqi people but stoped the interview and left?

Klaus

 

[STING2]

The USA had the legal backing of the United Nations through Security Council Resolutions 678, 687, and 1441. Israel has the right of self defense and certainly the right to target any terrorist organization in any country that is attacking it. Just as US strikes on Afghanistan were justified to get Al Quada, Israel is justified in striking Syria to get terrorist there.