U.S: 'Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction'

Yep, that's the new excuse for the war to prevent Tony Blair /Bush looking like they have egg all over their faces.

As far as I remember this war was justified under international law as a preemptive war to remove a threat to the US (by the US), the UK used the idea that Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions because it still had WMD's. Looks like both of those justifications don't hold up without WMD's. Translation, this war was illegal.

I don't think anyone argued that the Iraqi people weren't oppressed by Saddam, but liberating them simply was not the reason that we went to war. It just wasn't. Allowing yourself to be swayed by that excuse is allowing yourself to be decieved.

he knew we'd be coming back, probably as soon as shrub was elected!!!

All he has done is stockpile US dollars (how do you think he got that eh?), and allow his people to suffer under UN sanctions while he and his 2 crooked sons got richer and richer.

Right or wrong I think the US was right in doing what we had to do, to bring back some stability to the Mid-East regions.

Originally posted by VzH
Besides, Christianity makes more sense anyway,
that Allah crap just doesn't hold up to the rules of evidence, it's all very
circumstantial without any foundation.

I really hoped I wouldn't have to say these things over and over again but its ok, since I'm a very fast typer

VzH........ Laughing Out Loud

What does this thread have to do with religion? "Allah crap" ? Oh geeze.. lol

Your uneducated and easy manipulated mind-set cannot comprehend the information that the word Allah means GOD in Arabic.

If any religion makes sense - it is Islam.

Islam is also PEACE, TOLERANCE, HARMONY, and LOVE. Any terrorist action is completely against Islamic teachings.

Christianity does not make any sense at all, and whomever I debated gets stuck on almost every question I ask. This includes Bible Scholars and Christian Missionaries.

Christianity is a religion based on pagan rituals. A religion with numerous contradictions as well.

Christianity degrades women, encourages murder, and promotes slavery - condemning equality between human beings.

later

www.TheReligiousTruth.com...

"We haven't found any" will never quite cancel out "they have hidden them".
And no doubt GWB -or his advisors -always had in the mind the difficulty of demonstrating that there are none.

It's a pity that some replies here have led to the degeneration of this topic.
This is -or should be -a genuine "conspiracy" issue.

"the louts of colonialism."

A lot of people would like to see this issue disappear, but thankfully I can't see that happening. It was the given reason for war. We where told there was hard evidence. We where told that it was vital for these weapons to be removed.

Now we are told it's not important.

A couple of stories from today. From the Independant:

"So, Mr Straw, why did we go to war?"

* Jack Straw, 21 February 2003: 'Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them'

* Jack Straw, 14 May 2003: Asked of the need to find weapons of mass destruction... 'It's not crucial'

Mr Straw was accused of rewriting history after he appeared to undermine the Government's confident claim that Saddam held up to 10,000 litres of anthrax, declaring: "Ten thousand litres is one third of one petrol tanker. Whether or not we are able to find one third of one petrol tanker in a country twice the size of France remains to be seen."

Challenged on the importance of a fresh weapons find, he said: "It's not crucially important for this reason ... The evidence in respect of Iraq was so strong that the Security Council on the 8th of November said unanimously that Iraq's proliferation and possession of the weapons of mass destruction and unlawful missile systems, as well as its defiance of the United Nations, pose � and I quote � 'a threat to international peace and security'."

Peter Kilfoyle, a former defence minister, said: "Jack Straw is trying to reinvent history. All these claims about WMD are built on sand. If they do not find these weapons, it takes away the only conceivable justification for conducting this war.

"It shows the real reasons for this war: the superpower flexing its muscles and looking after resources, in this case petroleum."


news.independent.co.uk...

From the Telegraph, Robin Cook is again making the case for U.N weapons inspectors to be allowed back:


"The failure of the coalition to find any trace of the "fabled" weapons of mass destruction in the five weeks since the fall of Baghdad threw serious doubt on Tony Blair's justification for the invasion of Iraq, said Mr Cook, who quit the Cabinet because of his opposition to war.

If Saddam had really possessed weapons capable of posing a threat to Britain and the US - as Mr Blair and US President George Bush claimed - they would have been found by now, said Mr Cook.

He said he was "shocked" by the coalition's apparent determination to sideline the United Nations in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq and to exclude chief inspector Hans Blix's Unmovic team from the hunt for weapons programmes.

A draft resolution tabled by the US and UK at the Security Council would "marginalise" the international body, said Mr Cook. Mr Blair had made a "big mistake" in undermining the UN in the run-up to war and risked compounding his error now.

Mr Cook told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We were told by President Bush that this was a pre-emptive strike and it was necessary to get Saddam before he hit us.

"If he had anything with which to hit us, we would have found it by now. A nuclear bomb requires a nuclear reactor. A big missile system requires a big industrial factory. You can't hide these things.

"We were told we were going in there to disarm the weapons of mass destruction. If it was so compelling, so urgent, that we had to go in and disarm these weapons that posed such a big threat to us that it justified a pre-emptive strike, it is rather curious that they can't find these weapons"

LINK

"Ten thousand liter�s is one third of one petrol tanker. Whether or not we are able to find one third of one petrol tanker in a country twice the size of France remains to be seen."

By re-writing history what your implying is that the US must be lying about the WMD?

A very tenuous assumption and no at all clear in respect to what is potentially the European media to save face in light of the swift victory as well as clearly what was a cover up in respect to atrocities by the UN and its supporters. Estragon is correct this is an issue in which the word conspiracy is a factor. As the death toll rises
with respect to the innocents slaughtered in Iraq those who chose to ignore this fact do seem less significant.

How can the ideas that Saddam Hussein hid his WMD by considered surreal or impossible? Why would he have hid them? Because he did not want anyone to find them.

With today�s technology treasure maps are obsolete you just pick a location go there. Identify via satellite your longitude and latitude, write the numbers down then dig a hole and bury what you want hidden.

It�s really that simple and does not take a genius to understand.

As far as Mr. Blix well his credibility is well beyond anything as important as this.

Clearly this issue of mass graves was relevant to the UN concluding that dealing with Iraq militarily was relevant (it�s the primary reason we went to war with Bosnia).

The word incompetent is inappropriate; criminally negligent seem not enough, but coconspirator
now that makes sense.

To be honest Mr. Straw is responding to the reaction of the Iraqi people who at present seem to have stopped Protesting this is probably because the US is making public the effort to locate the 200,000 people they have reported missing in the last 10 years.

For the records beside them are those he did kill with Chemical Weapons, during the Iraq/Iran war. As well all the other dissidents during is regime prior to 10 years ago.

It�s actually very sad but it seems that Saddam Hussein may be responsible for the deaths of just over a million people. My impression is we should continue to look for WMD in Iraq and that the effort should clearly be a real one (God forbid they should end up in another person�s hands, which the UN is prepared to protect).

Guys you point does not hold the blood spilled in Babylon most of those people were buried alive your links claim only 3000 dead (see below), despite the fact that an organization independent of the US cites 15,000.

As well does you link add (again see below) to the mass graves found to date I will be honest despite the fact we are talking about Moslems, if I were Jewish, you guys would seem terrifying .

Well first off those are not my words; they�re from the articles.

��The European media to save face in light of the swift victory�

You think the whole European media was against the war? A large proportion, including some of the most powerful papers where all for it.

�How can the ideas that Saddam Hussein hid his WMD by considered surreal or impossible? Why would he have hid them? Because he did not want anyone to find them.�

This was my original view on the weapons. I thought that a reasonable quantity of chemical or biological agents would be found, but no nuclear. This however, is not the line the U.S and Britain took. They spent a whole year trying to convince us that Iraq possessed numerous nasty things and that they had hard evidence of their existence. Hard to have hard evidence of something�s existence if you don�t even know where it is.

�Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them� (Jack Straw)
If they where hidden or buried by Saddam as they are now saying, It would be a little difficult to deploy them in 45 minutes don�t you think?

And is it really so surreal and impossible to think that they are leading us blindfold along a path of their own choosing, or even that they were downright lying? Remember much of the evidence they gave for the existence of these weapons was indeed fabricated, like claim that Iraq had sought to acquire uranium from an African country, which was disproved by the International Atomic Energy Agency when it discovered that documents on which the claim had been made were crude forgeries.

And now they say it�s not important, it doesn�t really matter. Bit like a starving man running through a cactus patch to get to a biscuit, then when he gets there saying he doesn�t really feel hungry.

The mass graves and the deaths caused by Saddam are not relevant to this argument, terrible as they all are. These where not the reasons given for war. If stopping that was the reason for the war, then why not use that and say so? Or why not have done it at the end of the first Gulf war instead of leaving those thousands to be slaughtered when they thought we would protect them?

Let�s not forget that the whole basis of resolution 1441 was to gain support for the U.S to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. If these claims are found to be false, then the war would indeed be illegal. Now you may say �who cares, the people are free� etc, but I can tell you a lot of people will care, and what do think will happen if and when the U.S tries to make a case for invading, say, Iran or Syria? No one will believe what they say.

There is indeed a conspiracy in all of this, and it lies within our governments. They have been deliberately misleading everyone over this whole escapade and they will continue to do so. To me it increasingly looks like they are working to an end game that is known only to themselves. The scant attention they give to any public concerns on what they are doing, the irrelevancy of such things as evidence and reasoning along with the lip service they are given to the Israel/ Palestinian problem in the form of the farcical �road map to peace� says to me that they know where they are going with this, that they are waiting for or reaching for something outwith our knowledge. They are merely prodding us along the same path with scant regard of any consequences for themselves, and wither anyone calls their bluff or proves them right or wrong. Like they know it won�t matter a damn in the end.

Of course, many of us on this site have plenty of ideas of what the end game is�

The mass graves and the deaths caused by Saddam are not relevant to this argument, terrible as they all are. These where not the reasons given for war.

It happened after the 1st Golf War.
Just after the liberation of the Koweit, iraqis began to revolt themselves. and Saddam in order to restablish order in Iraq has done a big repression.

Mass Graves are indirectely our faults, as we stopped our armies at the border of Iraq and didn' t help the Iraqi resistance . At that time (1993), all occidentals wanted to let Saddam on the power.


Mass Graves you see on TV, are just a way to make the Iraq War look loke the WW2..........

"It happened after the 1st Golf War.
Just after the liberation of the Koweit, iraqis began to revolt themselves. and Saddam in order to restablish order in Iraq has done a big repression."

Yeah, that's what I what was saying Vzh.
But if we're discussing the existance of weapons, it's not really relevant.

[Edited on 20-5-2003 by kegs]

The C.I.A is conducting an inquiry into intelligence assessments before the war. Of course they say it was all planned ages ago.
According to one official it will ask "How did we do?", "What did we get right?", "What didn't we get right?"

"The inquiry comes as the Bush administration finds itself under ever increasing pressure to explain why it has been unable to provide evidence on the ground in Iraq to back up its very precise claims about weapons of mass destruction made before the war.

Some CIA operatives have claimed privately that war intelligence provided by the agency was not essentially flawed but was exaggerated and misused by politicians"

news.bbc.co.uk...


Translation:

"Lets say some stuff, see what happens, then afterwards lets go back and look at what we said and then suddenly realise it was a load of bull#."

Don't you just love it!!

Incidentally I notice the U.S has backed down (or compromised, depending on your perspective...) over re-admitting the U.N weapons inspectors. Bit of a climbdown however you paint it.

I noticed that some politicians, including Jack Straw, where getting themselves in muddle over the size of Iraq when the issue of finding WMD's came into the equation. Some were saying it was the size of France, others were saying twice the size of France. It's actually smaller than France, more like the size of Sweden. I like how they used France to compare its size. Any excuse to keep the 'damn Frenchies' in the spotlight.


[Edited on 23-5-2003 by kegs]