RLV

Never mind, these are just the premises for an hypothetical question. Assume they are true, please.

You haven't answered my question:

Would you invade Iraq only because they broke the peace agreement of '91?

Id est, the several thousands of Iraqi civilian dead, the unknown number of milltari civilian dead, the even greater number of wounded and mutilated, the losses among the invaders, the destruction to an already savaged country, the millions of dollars spent, the chaos Iraq is now in...
Would you bring all of this because Iraq broke the peace agreement of '91 without any WMDs, links to Al'Qaeda or aggressive moves?

Er... is that all?
Saddam claimed that he had destroyed the WMDs (rightly so, it seems) and he was colaborating, even if partially and grudgingly with the inspectors. The inspectors themselves said it quite loudly and clearly.
Maybe this could be considered a breach of the peace treaty (maybe), but it's quite of a stretch.

The invasion of Iraq as performed with the excuse of some non-existant WMDs and some non-existant links of Saddam with Al'Qaida, is "doing it right"?


RLV

Defiant Heretic

Ya, but read the rest of that thread. Only the OP is in favour of the war.

Godless Dave

The hell it is. His behavior is evidence that he didn't want UN employees having free reign of the country he ruled. How would our government react if the UN tried to send inspectors to our chemical and biological weapons facilities?

Yes, he violated the terms of the peace agreement. Yes, the agreement was flawed to begin with, and we should have taken a stronger stance after we liberated Kuwait. Yes, Clinton was too scared of Congress to take any substantial action against Iraq. But none of that justifies the costs in blood, money, and diplomatic reputation we are incurring because of Bush's idiocy.

Loren Pechtel

If he had turned over the requested data there wouldn't have been this tremendous shell game.

Furthermore, if he was cooperating he wouldn't have been playing a shell game with the inspectors in the first place.

ex-idaho

Whether Saddam turned over the correct info or not he was in a game he couldn't win. If he had issued reports that his military capability was weaker than he had let on then he would have possibly opened himself up to a coup or possible attacks fromt he Kurds or the Iranians. If he handed over documents that inflated his stockpiles to keep his enemies at bay then he would risk the wrath of Bush. It was truly a rock and a hard place.

David M. Payne

Two things guys:

1 Saddam has had and used WMD on his own people and the Iranians, so the idea that he didn't have any is absurd. Perhaps he didn't have any now, perhaps he did, but he sure did at one time didn't he? Iraq is about the size of Calif, and he has had ample time to hide any WMD he may have still had, as well as hide any equipment to produce them. The only way we will ever find any is if we get lucky, or some of the people involved in hiding them lead us to them. Most of the people who would have hidden them are on Saddam's side, or scared of reprisals for helping us out on this. I do believe he would also have developed nuclear weapons if he had stayed in power long enough. Current events show that he had hid the parts to get back into production of nukes when the heat was off of him, don't they? I also believe he would have given/sold WMD to anyone who was our enemy, if he hasn't already. He was a murderous monster who invaded two neighbors, killed thousands or hundreds of thousands of people during his rule, (we'll never know the real numbers) and deserved to be removed. We were the only ones that could do it.

2 This war is going to be a disaster for us, but it is also a little bit of damned if we do, damned if we don't. As a Vietnam vet, I see a quagmire in the making for sure in Iraq and in Afghanistan. We are fighting the same kind of enemy, one who is just as relentless to get their way (The Islamic way) as the VC and NVA were in Nam. The best we will get out of this is perhaps some friendly folks in Kurdistan. (And some hot neighbors like Turkey if we allow that to happen.) Bush did the right thing in removing Saddam, but it will blow up in his face anyway, which takes us right back to damned if we do, damned if we don't. (Yes, I know he wasn't the only murderous tyrant around, but he was dangerous in the same way that Hitler was, just on a smaller scale.) Mesopotamia was a collection of small tribal kingdoms before the British created Iraq, and like Yugoslavia, it will dissolve into at least two or three states when we are finally forced to pull out. I know that I'm in the minority here as far as believing that the wrong man, Bush, (I'm no Bush fan guys) did the right thing in getting rid of Saddam, but there it is. I just wish that there was some kind of happy ending for all this, but I don't see one. We are entering into a new phase of an old conflict, Islam against the West. And this time a few fundamentalist zealots with WMD can do a lot of damage, something that wasn't possible before humanity let the WMD genie out of the bottle worldwide.

There is an old Chinese curse that goes, "may you live in interesting times," perhaps Volk can expound on it a little. All I know is it's getting interesting out there.

David

theyeti

Yeah, prior to the first UN inspection program which destroyed all of them. The issue about what Saddam had in the past isn't relevant; the war was not sold on the claim that he used to have WMD, but that he did so now, and that more importantly, they represented a threat to us.

As for his past use of WMD against the Kurds and the Iranians, the first was ignored and the second one encouraged by the exact same people who are currently in the Bush administration.

Iraq is large, but unlike California, it's mostly empty desert. There are relatively few places that could be used to warehouse WMD. All of the likely places have been checked out already, and the people in charge of finding them have come to the conclusion that they probably don't exist.

And at any rate, the idea that Saddam would have burried them so deep that they could never be found is a odd one. WMD aren't useful unless they can be deployed to troops in the field within a reasonable amount of time. Which can't happen if they're burried miles down in some secret shaft hundreds of miles from the nearest base.



But the people who were involved keep saying that they no longer existed after the mid-90s. Given the huge stockpiles of WMD that Bush claimed existed, there's no way that they could remain hidden for long periods of time with a force of several thousand actively searching. And even if we assume they exist but can't be found, did the war make us any safer? I'd say it increased the odds of them falling into the hands of terrorists by many orders of magnitude.

It is possible that small amounts of WMD do exist somewhere that have been overlooked, and will continue to be for some time. But the Bush administration claimed that they had strong evidence that Saddam had WMD. Accidentally stumbling across some won't vindicate that claim.

Um, scared of reprisals from whom? Saddam's government has been disolved. Even if there were solid reasons to fear reprisal, the US is more than capable of safeguarding these people. They've already offered citizenship and other rewards to scientists who came forward with valuable information. I'd say that someone who knows about WMD has far more incentive to cooperate with the US.

Given that he didn't have an active nuclear program and there were UN inspectors watching his every move, that would have been next to impossible.

No, they don't. There were some pieces to a centrifuge, which along with 2500 others just like it, could have been used to enrich uranium, which is a necessary but not sufficient step in making a nuke. The pieces were burried under a rose bush for 12 years. It's unlikely that Saddam even remembered them.

Why do you think that? Is he so irrational that he would give away expensive and secretive weapons to people who he could not control? Islamic fundamentalists would be just as likely to use them on him, since they hated him.

Well, when WMD arguments fail, there's always the "he was a muderous monster" argument to fall back on.

He's hardly the world's only muderous monster. There are dozens of them, and if we use this as a pretext for war, we've basically removed any reasonable standards for when war is or is not appropriate. The UN and other international organizations do not recognize "being a monster" as a justifiable excuse to invade a sovereign nation. It sets up a dangerous precedent where almost any country that has a leader who is anti-democratic or kills people for political reasons (most of them) can be invaded on a whim.

As for Saddam's two earlier invasions, which could potentially establish him as a regional threat, he got his ass kicked during both. Which pretty much establishes that he's not a legitimate threat.

And the US is not the only one who could have invaded and ousted him. A UN sponsored coalition could have done it just as easily, and almost certainly with a rosier post-war outcome. But the UN didn't find Bush's rhetoric convincing.

I agree with most of this, but it might be a little alarmist.

theyeti

David M. Payne

We will see if there are any WMD theyeti, I don't know yet, and neither do you, or anyone else here. I work in an industry that was hit by the Anthrax attack. That was something that could be produced in a lab the size of a small house, and there are a lot of houses in Iraq. The Sars virus could be one example of bio warfare that got out of hand, who knows for sure. That�s the problem with bio weapons, as I pointed out in this post. I agree that Bush, in his hurry to get the guy that tried to kill his dad, bumbled and stumbled his way into this quagmire that Iraq will turn out to be. But still Saddam killed a lot more people in a week then we ever did there during the whole war. As for being alarmist, seeing war up close and personal will do that for you. We've already had one Islamic religious leader give the OK for the nuking of the west, and we know that one Islamic nation in turmoil has them, don't we? Do they also have bio weapons? Who knows, but as the link in the article above makes clear there are some scientists that are worried that it may be only a matter of time before some group has them, and uses them.

David

RED DAVE

I find it extraordinarily difficult to understand how anyone, at this late date, can credit the US invasion of Iraq with any positive motive whatsoever. As far as I'm concerned, this is a level of political naivite, masquerading as open-mindedness and rational caution, that is actually concealing a political agenda that favors the Bush administration.

One more time down the road.

1. During the 1980s, under Reagan of sainted memory, we armed Saddam Hussein as a stalking horse against Iran. this included giving him illegal chemical and biological weapons.

2. Prior to Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the Bush Sr. administration winked and hinted that such an invasion would be tolerated.

3. During the subsequent war, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed. The war was a shooting gallery and test for US weapons and war techniques against an enemy which, while verbally agressive, was militarily impotent. And we knew it.

4. In the years after the Gulf War, under Bush Sr., Clinton and bush Jr., we maintained a murderous embargo of food and medicine that caused the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis, mostly children. Far more than were killed by Hussein and his murderers.

5. There is no evidence that Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 and Al-Quaeda.

6. There is no evidence that, subsequent to the Gulf War, Iraq had possession of weapons or mass destruction, or their delivery systems.

7. Prior to 9/11, there was no expression on the part of the Bushies that Iraq's weapons were a threat to local peace, American security or world peace.

8. Prior to several months before the war, there was no concern wahtsoever on the part of the Bush administration about the freedom of the Iraqi (or any other) people.

9. Other ways, such as actively supporting opposition, democratic forces, could have weakened and overthrown Hussein's regime. Even such a disgusting prededent as the US overthrow of the democratic socialist regime in Chile shows what can be done short of war.

10. This is all a bullshit front for the murderous neo-imperialism of Bush & Co. The connections to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and goal of Iraqi freedom are all rationalizations for the ambitions and murderous fantasies of the Right.

101. There is no reason whatsoever to credit Bush & Co. with any regard for truth, peace, freedom. Their actions here and abroad show their fanatical dedication to preditory capitalism of the worst sort, dictatorial methods and propaganda techniques the likes of which have never been seen before in this country.

And they're just getting warmed up.

RED DAVE

David M. Payne

I agree with some of the things you say here RD, ( in bold) but not all of them.

Well RD, you may be right about some of what you said, but that doesn't mean that Saddam was a good guy who deserved to stay in power. Is Bush a right wing jerk? Yep. Is he out for his buds just like Saddam was? Yep. Do I like and admire him and the direction he would like to take this country in? The answer is in "The Emerald Bay Club," you just have to read between the lines.

David