So, no WMD after allFollow

well it is official now.......convieneitly AFTER the election i might add.........

we butchered over 100,000 human beings......for no justifiable reason.......

god bless america, 4 more years, wooohooo

Just take them out the exit being covered by Al-Jazeera.

Anyone without their head up the Bush administration's collective as[b][/b]s.

If you support GW you are a moron. Pure and simple.

Based on exit polls done during the election, a majority of people agreed with the decision to go to war and this division was a major factor in who people voted for. Now, last time I checked, democracy still ran pretty much on the majority.

Seriously though, I thought the democrats had a pretty good shot for the presidency, with the whole Iraq mess. But somehow they managed to put up probably the only person who could have lost to Bush at this time. I do not think this election confirmed that America likes Bush, just that Kerry is an incredibly large loser.

I'm going to play my Liberal Rhetoric card and claim "that sh[b][/b]it was all planted!"


Now, what are we going to do about North Korea, which plainly and clearly has weapons?

Hans Blix is the head of UN inspections for WMD in Iraq, therefore he knows more than any person on the planet wether Saddam had WMD in Iraq.

A more credible source of information on that subject you could not find.

Fox is a politically motivated News channel who care more about telling their viewers what they want to hear.

Bill Clinton is seen as widely respected and much loved Ex-American president by most of the World.

G.W.Bush Snr is seen as widely respected and well liked Ex-American President by most of the world.

R. Reagan was a well respected and well loved ex american President by much of the world

G.W.Bush Jnr is a widely hated and reviled figure who is seen as a warmongerer and probable War criminal by most of the world including this poster.

Ok. I can buy that, but I also have to agree that the point was that Iraq was supposed to cooperate "fully". We can play the semantics game, and I'll certainly grant that he did cooperate in the "slightest way". But I'd argue (and Han's Blix says this in his report as well), that it's clear that Iraq has never done any more then the minimum they thought they could get away with.

As I stated above, your impression of the Blix report will vary based on how you approach this sort of political situation in the first place. To those who see the use of sanctions and inspections as means to make "progress" with Iraq, then the process was working. After all, Iraq was slowly divulging more and more information. Grudgingly, but it was happening.

If you see the use of sanctions and inspections as a means to enforce compliance (with presumed consequences for failure to comply), then you'll see them as having failed miserably. The purpose of the sanctions was not to get Iraq to meet the letter of the santions themselves. That would be pointless. The purpose of the sanctions was to disarm Iraq and to do so in a way that ensured everyone that they had done this, and they were not going to attack any of their neighbors if we removed said sanctions.

If you hold that second viewpoint (as I do), then it appears pretty obvious that Iraq was meeting the absolute minimum requirements under the UN Sanctions that they had to in order to avoid consequence. Clearly, they had no intention to disarm or comply with the terms in general. They were just stringing the UN along and hoping that all the people with the first viewpoint would believe progress was being made and not take any action against them.

At the risk of invoking Godwins, that's exactly what Germany did in the 30s. They took actions that were just not quite enough to get anyone to declare war on them. They worked out exactly the boundaries of what they could do without invoking real consequence and worked within that boundary instead of the boundaries of legality. Thus, they could annex several territories, and no one did anything. They could attack a couple nations and no one would do anything. Ultimately, Germany managed to take over roughtly half of Europe before turning itself on Denmark, Holland, and France. If those nations had done something when Germany first started working the system, they could have avoided a massive conflict.

While those two obviously are not identical, the same basic methodology is in play. When you know you are dealing with a body that largely will ignore anything you do as long as you can give them an excuse for not taking action, you can work that to your advantage. Saddam most certainly was doing that. It's *obvious* to any but the UN appologists.




Heh. I'll play the semantics game myself now. I didn't say that Iraq didn't make "Any attempts to comply with 1441". I said that Iraq made no "Good Faith" at meeting the conditions. Those are two different things.

Again. Blix says this at the beginning of his report. He states that the responsiblity and burden of compliance is on Iraq. He states that full compliance requires offering information, not requiring that it be wrested from you. To me "good faith" compliance is what he's talking about, and Iraq very clearly has not done that at all.




That was the "one incident" he refers to. Basically, they were required to submit locations and work through their people for everything. The one time they went somewhere without clear identification and without notifying the officials, they got some pretty suspicious backlash as a result.

Blix isn't super specific, but it does sound like they were not really allowed to go anywhere or talk to anyone without the Iraqi govenment managing the entire thing. That's not "unfettered" access IMO.

Edited, Fri Jan 14 17:51:57 2005 by gbaji

Ugh, reply just got eaten. (EDIT: Replying to Gbaji.)

Good points all around, and I'll stop using semantics. I explained above why that bugged me, so I'll let it go now.

Have nothing much to refute above, except a lot of us were skeptical throughout the lead-up to war and were very let down by the lack of objective thought given to the situation by the media, Congress, President, and American people. While you say Saddam was clearly not cooperating, the fact (or likeilhood) is that he didn't have any prohibited weapons. He was smokescreening or being obstinate, but IMO and that of many others, our level of "proof" of his noncompliance was wholly insufficient. And even seemed very rigged in many cases.

Our justification for war constantly shifted depending on what was disputed week-to-week. The whole situation was a mess, and I simply hope we approach Administration claims with much more skepticism the next time, be it when we bristle towards Iran, Syria, or Uruguay.

Edited, Fri Jan 14 18:13:54 2005 by Palpitus

Yes he was thats why he managed to get worldwide support for Desert Storm because people in high places and the general population of 1st world countries respected him. Yeah right because he wasn't unnaimously cheered in London on every visit, isn't lauded as the man who ended the Cold war, wasn't respected by Gorbachev/Thatcher to name but to world leaders of the time.

Disregarding all the reasons why invading Iraq would have been a good idea:

1 The reason USA and UK (Bush & BLiar) gave was WMD
2 UK & US intelligence was presented to Bush & Bliar as unreliable, but Bush & Bliar treated it as certainty
3 Iraq still has no relatiionship with 9/11, Al-Q'aeda,
4 Iraq now poses a greater threat to world peace than it did before the war
5 Batman pwnz Spiderman
7 What happned to 6?
8 Bush & BLiar care about poll & election results; not right and wrong
9 Kerry would be no different
1,235 John Travolta has a strange chin (someone needed to say it)
B Palestine has been screwed by the West for 60 years
6 Ahh there it is!
VII The Senate knows that Israel is the most reactionary regime in the world, but is terrified of the Jewish banking lobby
d Shaggy was a calming influence over Scooby Doo
iii Shania Twain may be a sh[i][/i]ite singer, but she's hot

Sure. You can certainly find examples of things that were suspected to be prohibited items that later turned out not to be. You can even make a list of them if you want. But that does not change the fact that there were multiple violations of the terms of virtually ever resolution passed against Iraq over an 11 year period of time.

The fact that the inspectors had to go looking for WMD instead of simply being shown them is the first clue that Iraq was not complying. The fact that they were continually told one thing, then had to discover for themselves that it was false is the next indication.

The term "inspectors" in this case is not like a police inspector. Their original job description was not to figure out where Iraq was hiding WMD materials. Their job was to witness Iraq complying with the resolutions that required them to disarm their programs. They became detectives out of necessity when Iraq steadfastly refused to do that.

We can also generate a list of things in which proscribed materials were found after the Iraqi authorities had reported them destroyed, or just outright denied they ever existed. The point is that we should not have had to find that stuff. If Iraq was to comply, they were supposed to simply take us to where the stuff was and show it to us so it could be inspected and then witnessed as destroyed. That's what was supposed to happen. That's not what did happen though. That's why Iraq was in violation.


You're basically trying to come up with a list of things that weren't violations. That's great and all, but the point isn't to come up with a list of things Iraq didn't do wrong, but to prove that Iraq wasn't doing *anything* out of compliance with UN resolutions. One instance of violation is enough. In the case of Iraq, we see a pattern of consistent violation starting from the first day and not changing even after being given their "final warning" in the form of resolution 1441.