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There were chemical weapons in Iraq after all

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  • #16
    Originally posted by Louis View Post
    Rationale? You mean the smoking gun being a mushroom cloud? Judith Miller taking leaks from Cheney which Cheney used to justify his position? Curveball? Ahmed Chalabi? Meetings in Prague with Mohammed Atta? Blairs forty five minutes ?

    The fact that Bush and Rumsfeld concealed this intel because GHWB had the receipts for what they found? No I don't accept that. Mate.
    Ask him for some evidence that Saddam was producing chemical weapons. He knows that was the major pretext for US involvement, not a bunch of pre-91 stocks. Don't get dragged off course & into arguments on side points. Just keep hammering away for evidence & see what he can turn up. Should be interesting.
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    • #17
      The very fact that he still had chemical stocks is a violation of his terms of surrender. THAT IS NOT IN DISPUTE.

      And old mustard gas will kill you just as good as new mustard gas.
      Last edited by Officer of Engineers; 16 Oct 14,, 14:47.
      Chimo

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      • #18
        Originally posted by Louis View Post
        Rationale? You mean the smoking gun being a mushroom cloud? Judith Miller taking leaks from Cheney which Cheney used to justify his position? Curveball? Ahmed Chalabi? Meetings in Prague with Mohammed Atta? Blairs forty five minutes ?
        The smoking gun are chemical artillery shell being maintained in Saddam's arsenal. New development of the Al Samoud chemical delivery SSM. And last, Saddam's ring of fire and our signal capture of his WMD release orders.

        In other words, it was Saddam who convinced us, NOT Bush, Cheney, nor Blair.
        Chimo

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        • #19
          IMO there were many good reasons for removing saddam. the "imminent threat" of WMDs really was not one of them.

          one of the reasons why this was hushed up was precisely because a bunch of pre-91 stocks really did not help the Bush Administration's case that Saddam was actively making/procuring WMDs.
          There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

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          • #20
            Our nukes are 40 years old. Does anyone think that we can't use them right now?
            Chimo

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            • #21
              our well-maintained, secured, occasionally-upgraded nukes, no problem.

              "filthy, rusty or corroded" shells that leak and were stored in plastic don't indicate to me an active WMD program.

              that's not to say that these weapons weren't dangerous-- they certainly were to the men and women whom handled them-- but simply put, what we discovered there was NOT the same as what was being described by the Bush Administration to explain why it was so urgent that we needed to act -now-.

              to the point where we couldn't wait for Canadian support, or even for our own forces to be positioned properly.
              There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

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              • #22
                Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
                Our nukes are 40 years old. Does anyone think that we can't use them right now?
                radiation damage

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                • #23
                  Originally posted by astralis View Post
                  "filthy, rusty or corroded" shells that leak and were stored in plastic don't indicate to me an active WMD program.
                  You forget the period. Just right after 11 September. Hell, even I could imagine of spraying blue foam over the pallets. Put it on a frieghter, send it to New York harbour and put a couple of bombs beside the pallet to rip the things apart, at the very least contimating NY Harbour.
                  Chimo

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                  • #24
                    You forget the period. Just right after 11 September. Hell, even I could imagine of spraying blue foam over the pallets. Put it on a frieghter, send it to New York harbour and put a couple of bombs beside the pallet to rip the things apart, at the very least contimating NY Harbour.
                    yeah, it's in the realm of the possible...but probable? NK, Libya, Syria, Iran could have all done that as well.

                    hell, every country listed had significantly greater capability than Saddam's Iraq in the chemical weapons regard. and of course, NK and Iran had and have more in the way of nuke terrorism capability.

                    i understand that some of this is 20/20 hindsight: there was a real intelligence failure on the status of Saddam's programs. but there's no doubt in my mind that the Administration exaggerated many of the intel community's very careful, cautious modifiers to make the case for war, and that the primary geopolitical reason why they wanted to remove Saddam was not so much an imminent threat from WMDs but because they really believed they could remake the Middle East.
                    There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

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                    • #25
                      We'll the Wonkette puts it better than I could.

                      The Revisionist Thing
                      Rightwing Reads NYT Headline, Declares Bush Was Right About Everything
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                      by Doktor Zoom
                      Oct 16 2:28 pm 2014


                      As we noted Wednesday, the New York Times has discovered that, after invading Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein from killing everybody with his huge Weapons of Mass Destruction program, which definitely included an ongoing program of building new chemical and nuclear weapons, the Bush administration did everything it could do to cover up the actual chemical weapons — relics from the Iran-Iraq war — that they did find.

                      Obviously, the take-away for a lot of rightwing bloggers is easy: Suck it, liberals, Bush was right about WMDs in Iraq! Which kind of ignores the obvious question: If George Bush was so totally vindicated by the discovery of some old chemical weapons in Iraq, why is it that we’re only learning about it 10 years later? Where was the great big “Mission Accomplished” banner for that one?

                      As a case study of how wingnuts are spinning the five or so paragraphs they actually read of C.J. Chivers’s story in the Times, let us examine this piece from the still-toxic remnants of the New York Sun, which explains that the Times story is, in reality, “best viewed as journalism’s longest correction,” because obviously the paper got it so thoroughly wrong with “all these charges about how President George W. Bush and his camarilla lied about the danger of Saddam’s chemical arsenal.” That’s apparently a set of now-disproven charges that President George W. Bush and his camarilla were also party to, seeing as how Bush himself made those high-larious jokes about the WMDS he couldn’t find.



                      Not that Bush — or more likely, Sith Lord Cheney — isn’t above coming forward in the next few days and also retroactively crowing that they were absolutely right, and that those rusty 155 mm shells and leaky rockets were definitely the droids we were looking for.

                      Just to review, Chivers’s piece is not primarily about whether Bush Was Right anyway, although he’s quite clear that one of the main reasons for the cover-up was that the administration didn’t want to publicize the nature of the chemical weapons that U.S. forces unearthed — literally — in Iraq. They were old, often inoperable leftovers from the Iran-Iraq war, not a one of them newer than 1991, and most of them were weapons of U.S. design and European manufacture. The mobile chemical weapons labs and nuclear programs that Bush told us were definitely the reason to invade simply were not there, and so the existence of the old but often still-lethal relics was hushed up — often at the cost of poor medical treatment for injuries to the soldiers who found them and blew them up as part of the effort to dispose of conventional explosives.

                      Even the Pentagon was invested in the narrative that if there was no active chemical weapons program in Iraq, there simply were no chemical weapons, and therefore there was no need to warn ordnance disposal teams that they might come across the things, or to prepare medical teams to treat them. In some cases, soldiers were denied Purple Hearts for their injuries because the Pentagon didn’t consider mustard-gas burns incurred in digging up Saddam’s obsolete stockpiles as combat-related injuries.

                      Ah, but on the right, here’s the executive summary of Chivers’s exposé, again from that New York Sun piece. What the Times was really saying was:

                      “Dang, we’re angry at Mr. Bush for failing to tell us we found the weapons that he had warned were there and that the Times insisted weren’t.”

                      To cover its own bumbling of the story, the Times tries to blame Mr. Bush for the fact that a number of our heroic GIs were injured by poison from the weapons the Times had claimed were a fiction.

                      Never mind that they were injured because the military was not warning them or their medics about the danger. Or that we never heard Bush crowing about being right, surely the greatest act of self-denial in his presidency.

                      Also, seeing this story as a vindication of the Chickenhawk War also misses another point: If we went to war in Iraq to get rid of these pre-1991 chemical weapons — a claim that the Pentagon already refuted in 2006 — why did the military do such a piss-poor job of destroying Saddam’s old chemical weapons? For instance, somewhere during the nine-year occupation of Iraq, maybe we should have done something about the stockpile at Al Muthanna, which we knew was

                      the site where the UN ordered Saddam Hussein to dispose of his declared chemical munitions in the first place. Those weapons that could not safely be destroyed were sealed and left to decay on their own, which they did. The site was neither “active” nor “clandestine” – it was a declared munitions dump being used to hold the corroded weapons which Western powers themselves had in most cases helped Saddam procure.

                      You might think, if that was really our Golden Purpose for invading Iraq, that complex might have been addressed. Instead, we ignored it because the mission shifted to fighting the insurgency that resulted from our stupid invasion, and which evolved into ISIS, which now has taken possession of the Al Muthanna site. The chemical weapons there aren’t especially good as WMDs, but in the hands of those sadistic assholes, they certainly can do terrible things as IEDs and in small-scale attacks. Let’s blame Obama, OK?

                      To summarize: We didn’t find the massive WMD program the war was meant to destroy, but we found some chemical weapons, like a SWAT raid that was supposed to bust a heroin ring but instead killed a family’s dog and arrested a teenager for his pot stash. So let us be glad: Bush was right, and the Times owes him an apology and should probably reinstate Judith Miller as their chief foreign correspondent — yes, the NY Sun calls for that, too.

                      Maybe George W. Bush should also apologize to himself for all those times he said that we found no chemical weapons because of flawed pre-war intelligence. Obviously, he was much smarter than even he gave himself credit for.

                      [New York Times (really, read the whole thing) / New York Sun / The Intercept / Salon]

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                      • #26
                        Ah, 9/11 and chemical weapons.

                        I remember the Halloween of 2001 in my neighborhood. Some kids thought it would be funny to throw some flour at each other. Right between a German school and a US church.

                        7th Army HQ - next door - moved in their local CBRN unit which spent a full eight hours decontaminating the road.

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                        • #27
                          Originally posted by astralis View Post
                          yeah, it's in the realm of the possible...but probable?
                          11 September. So, yes, not only probable. An intolerable strategic threat.

                          Originally posted by astralis View Post
                          NK, Libya, Syria, Iran could have all done that as well.
                          None of them signed terms of surrender and then proceeded to violate those terms.
                          Chimo

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                          • #28
                            Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
                            You forget the period. Just right after 11 September. Hell, even I could imagine of spraying blue foam over the pallets. Put it on a frieghter, send it to New York harbour and put a couple of bombs beside the pallet to rip the things apart, at the very least contimating NY Harbour.
                            IIRC, those shells were buried and the buried shells accounted as "destroyed" or "disposed". Perhaps the men of Iraqi Army didn't want to risk their healths by digging them up and properly disposed them? I can see how they would tell Saddam and his cronies that they were destroyed without actually being destroyed because nobody in their right mind would expose themselves willingly to take care of those munitions. If that is the case, I don't really see how those shells actually constitute a violation of the terms of surrender.

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                            • #29
                              Originally posted by Blademaster View Post
                              IIRC, those shells were buried and the buried shells accounted as "destroyed" or "disposed".
                              The same methodology Saddam used to "destroy" his nuclear weapons program.
                              Chimo

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                              • #30
                                Whose chemical weapons program killed more Iraqi's?


                                Toxic Legacy Of US Assault On Fallujah ‘Worse Than Hiroshima’ | PopularResistance.Org

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