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Originally Posted by aceventura3
You guys seem to ignore the fact that Iraq continually ignored UN mandates.
With that it seems you would have allowed him to re-establish his nuclear program (assuming he did not have one at the time we invaded). Once he re-established that proram would you have let him develop nuclear weapons?
Would you let him attack his neighbors? would you let him control the Middle East? At what point would you use the military to stop his defiant activities?
For the record - I never gave a crap about being greeted as liberators. i wanted Saddaam out of power. I wanted a military foothold in Iraq. The "liberators" arguement is a strawman argument, that is why I ignore it.
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aceventura3, as Gen. Zinni states below, and the Duelfer report confirms, we threw out ten years of planning, we had Saddam "boxed in", we had a cost effective, bloodless containment program, partially funded by our former 1991 Gulf War allies......and now we have excuses, lies, from our "leaders" and an expensive and increasingly uncontrollabe situation on the ground in Iraq, that may require a war with Iran to prevent that country, "the winner", from leveraging the strategic "reward" that Bush and Cheney have handed it:
Ace...in the last day, in my post (#3 in the thread at this <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?p=2120124#post2120124">link<a/>)
I tried to bring to every reader's attention, my observation that Mr. Cheney was reduced to reciting "untruths", on a network TV news broadcast, to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq:
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea.../20060910.html
.....Q Then why in the lead-up to the war was there the constant linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's a different issue. Now, there's a question of whether or not al Qaeda -- whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11; separate and apart from that is the issue of whether or not there was a historic relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet's testimony before the Senate intel committee in open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern, a relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al Qaeda......
........we know that Zarqawi, running a terrorist camp in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, after we went into 9/11 -- then fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of '02......
.........Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went into Iraq. You had the facility up at Kermal, a poisons facility run by an Ansar al-Islam, an affiliate of al Qaeda......
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<b>Note that Cheney used "kermal, a poison faciltity", as a reason to link Saddam with al-Qaeda, and thus, justify the US invasion of Iraq.</b> Kermal is more often spelled as <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=khurmal&btnG=Google+Search">Khurmal</a> .....
In that same post, Aceventura3, I then provided at least 16 excerpts (most of them with links...)from news reports, from sources as diverse as the "Economist", the Jerusalem Post, from NPR, and from Fox News, dated between early 2002 and April, 2003, that all reported that "the posion camp", at Kermal, was located in Kurdish controlled territory, in the nothern Iraq, "no fly zone" airspace, and was reported, in multiple news articles, to receive supplies of weapons and life sustaining supplies, from Iran, not Iraq, and that the camp was located on the Iran border....or articles that reported around this state of affairs:
Quote:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...61575#continue
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The, February, 2003 by GREG MILLER
SHOWDOWN ON IRAQ
Why not hit terrorist camp?
Lawmakers question lack of military action
By GREG MILLER Los Angeles Times
Friday, February 7, 2003
Washington -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spent a significant part of his presentation to the United Nations this week describing a terrorist camp in northern Iraq where al-Qaida affiliates are said to be training to carry out attacks with explosives and poisons.
But neither Powell nor other administration officials answered the question: What is the United States doing about it?
Lawmakers who have attended classified briefings on the camp say that they have been stymied for months in their efforts to get an explanation for why the U.S. has not launched a military strike on the compound near the village of Khurmal. Powell cited its ongoing operation as one of the key reasons for suspecting ties between Baghdad and the al-Qaida terror network.
The lawmakers put new pressure on the Bush administration on Thursday to explain its decision to leave the facility unharmed.
"Why have we not taken it out?" Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) asked Powell during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. "Why have we let it sit there if it's such a dangerous plant producing these toxins?"
Powell declined to answer, saying he could not discuss the matter in open session.
"I can assure you that it is a place that has been very much in our minds. And we have been tracing individuals who have gone in there and come out of there," Powell said.
<b>Absent an explanation from the White House,
some officials suggested the administration had refrained from striking the compound in part to preserve a key piece of its case against Iraq.</b>
"This is it, this is their compelling evidence for use of force," said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified. "If you take it out, you can't use it as justification for war."............
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In 2002, Mr. Cheney seemed to have a high opinion of Gen. Zinni:
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresid...p20020324.html
March 24, 2002
The Vice President Appears on Meet the Press (NBC)
MR. TIM RUSSERT: Our issues this Sunday: Vice President Dick Cheney's trip to the Middle East; 12 countries in 10 days. What did he learn about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? What was he told about Iraq's Saddam Hussein? This morning: Our guest, the vice president of the United States, reports to the nation.
Then: Day 169 of the military operation in Afghanistan. The enemy continues to hide, regroup and resist. With us: The commander in chief of the United States Central Command, General Tommy R. Franks.
.......VICE PRES. CHENEY:.....What we have done--the president's been actively engaged in setting overall policy. Colin Powell, the secretary of State, has been actively engaged directly with Arafat and Sharon on a direct basis. Now, we've got General Zinni in the region now who's a superb officer who's on the ground every day actively working with the security officials on both sides, as well as Sharon and Arafat.....
.......VICE PRES. CHENEY: Again, this is--all is going to depend upon what happens on the ground in Israel. I'll be guided very much by General Zinni's thinking.....
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Here is Zinni describing the reasoning for invading Iraq, where we were then, strategically speaking, and where we are now, and he faults the "planners":
Quote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12067487/page/6/
Transcript for April 2
John McCain, Tony Zinni
Updated: 12:44 a.m. ET April 2, 2006
......MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe the American media is distorting the news from Iraq, or presenting an accurate picture?
GEN. ZINNI: Well, I think the American media’s being made a scapegoat for what’s going on out there. At last count, I think something like 80 journalists have been killed in Iraq. It’s hard to get outside the green zone and not risk your life, or risk kidnapping, at a minimum, to get the story. And it’s hard to blame the media for no good stories when the security situation is such that they can’t even go out and get the good stories without risking their lives. And you have to remember that it’s hard to dwell on the good things when the bad things are so overwhelmingly traumatic and catastrophic, you know? So I think that’s an unfair blame that’s put on the media..........
....MR. RUSSERT: I want to bring you back to a book you co-wrote with Tom Clancy called “Battle Ready.” And you wrote this: “In the lead-up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence, and irresponsibility; at worst, lying, incompetence, and corruption.” That’s very serious.
GEN. ZINNI: Yes.
MR. RUSSERT: Where did you see that? At what level?
GEN. ZINNI: Well, I—first of all, I saw it in the way the intelligence was being portrayed. I knew the intelligence; I saw it right up to the day of the war. I was asked at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing a month before the war if I thought the threat was imminent. I didn’t. Many of the people I know that were involved in the intelligence side of this, or, or in the military felt the same way. I saw the—what this town is known for: spin, cherry-picking facts, using metaphors to evoke certain emotional responses, or, or shading the, the context. We, we know the mushroom clouds and, and the other things that were all described that the media’s covered well. I saw on the ground, though, a sort of walking away from 10 years worth of planning.
You know, ever since the end of the first Gulf War, there have been—there’s been planning by serious officers and planners and others, and policies put in place. Ten years worth of planning, you know, were thrown away; troop levels dismissed out of hand; General Shinseki basically insulted for speaking the truth and giving a, an honest opinion; the lack of cohesive approach to how we deal with the aftermath; the political, economic, social reconstruction of a nation, which is no small task; a belief in these exiles that anyone in the region, anyone that had any knowledge would tell you were not credible on the ground; and on and on and on. Decisions to disband the army that were not in the initial plans. I mean there’s a series of disastrous mistakes. We just heard the secretary of state say these were tactical mistakes. These were not tactical mistakes. These were strategic mistakes, mistakes of policy made back here. Don’t blame the troops. They’re the ones that perform the tactics on the ground. They’ve been magnificent. If anything saves this, it will be them.
MR. RUSSERT: Should someone resign?
GEN. ZINNI: Absolutely.
MR. RUSSERT: Who?
GEN. ZINNI: Secretary of defense, to begin with......
.......MR. RUSSERT: I want to bring you back to August 26, 2002. The Veterans of Foreign War had a convention, a meeting. Vice President Cheney was the guest speaker. You were honored, as you can see the medal around your neck there. This is what the vice president said on that day.
(Videotape, August 26, 2002):
VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is not doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.
(End videotape)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12067487/page/7/
........MR. RUSSERT: After that event, The Washington Post captured your thinking in a conversation with you. “Cheney’s certitude bewildered [retired General Tony] Zinni. ... ‘In my time at CENTCOM, I watched the intelligence, and never - not once - did it say, “He has WMD.”’ Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained current on the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and the military. ‘I did consulting work for the agency, right up to the beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I’d say to analysts, “Where’s the threat?”’ Their response, he recalls, was, ‘Silence.’ Zinni’s concern deepened as Cheney pressed on. ... Zinni’s conclusion as he slowly walked off the stage was that the Bush administration was determined to go to war. A moment later, he had another, equally chilling thought: ‘These guys don’t understand what they’re getting into.’” Why did you think that on that day?
GEN. ZINNI: Well, first of all, prior to that, I heard the president say because this—these rumors of debates and people pushing for this entry into Iraq that the president said, “Well, look, I’m going to listen to the debate, and then I’ll look at the intelligence.” First of all, I thought that was a little backwards, but I said, “Well, the president hasn’t made up his mind to this point, and when he looks at the intelligence, takes an honest look at it, when he hears the debate, he’ll realize that this isn’t something that should be done now, and it should—and if you’re going to do it, you would do it in a way to try to restart the United Nations process, go back to what President Bush 41 had done.”
But what I heard on that stage today, or that day was not the case of restarting that process in any serious way. I heard the case being built to go to war right away. And what bothered me, I had been hearing about some of the assumptions on the planning, dismissal of the for—previous plans, and I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn’t fit what I knew. There was no solid proof, that I ever saw, that Saddam had WMD.
Now, I’d be the first to say we had to assume he had WMD left over that wasn’t accounted for: artillery rounds, chemical rounds, a SCUD missile or two. But these things, over time, degrade. These things did not present operational or strategic level threats at best. Plus, we were watching Saddam with an army that had caved in. It was nothing like the Gulf War army. It was a shell of its former self. We knew we could go through it quickly. We’d stripped away his air defenses. He was at our mercy. We had air superiority before we even—or actually air supremacy before we would even start an operation. So to say that this threat was imminent or grave and gathering, seemed like a great exaggeration to me.
MR. RUSSERT: The president, the secretary of state, all said he was not contained, he was not in a box, that he was a madman.
GEN. ZINNI: Well, I think that’s—that is an insult to the troops who, for 10 years, ran the containment: those brave pilots who flew the no-fly zones, those sailors who enforced the maritime intercept operations, our soldiers and Marines that were on the ground out there that responded to every crisis, our support for the efforts of the inspectors that were in there. You know, we—we had less troops on a day-to-day basis out there than go to work at the Pentagon every day doing this. And these were not assigned troops to CENTCOM. These were troops that rotated in and out. We had allies out there that helped foot the bill for this, $300 million dollars to $500 million dollars a year supporting us with bases, supporting us with overflights, supporting us with assistance in kind, joining us in places like Somalia and the Balkans when we required coalition troops. I thought the containment worked remarkably well, and it was a tribute to our troops and how they handled it......
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The Duelfer report documents that there was no Iraqi plan to reconstitute WMD after the UN sanctions ended, or any organizing of scientists in Iraq, or recruiting of them, by Saddam's government, to accomplish that goal:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Oct6.html
U.S. 'Almost All Wrong' on Weapons
Report on Iraq Contradicts Bush Administration Claims
By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A01
The 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq's illicit weapons capability and, for the most part, Saddam Hussein did not try to rebuild it, according to an extensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that contradicts nearly every prewar assertion made by top administration officials about Iraq.
Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration chose to complete the U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, said Hussein's ability to produce nuclear weapons had "progressively decayed" since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no evidence of "concerted efforts to restart the program."
The findings were similar on biological and chemical weapons. While Hussein had long dreamed of developing an arsenal of biological agents, his stockpiles had been destroyed and research stopped years before the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Duelfer said Hussein hoped someday to resume a chemical weapons effort after U.N. sanctions ended, but had no stocks and had not researched making the weapons for a dozen years.
Duelfer's report, delivered yesterday to two congressional committees, represents the government's most definitive accounting of Hussein's weapons programs, the assumed strength of which the Bush administration presented as a central reason for the war. While previous reports have drawn similar conclusions, Duelfer's assessment went beyond them in depth, detail and level of certainty.
"We were almost all wrong" on Iraq, Duelfer told a Senate panel yesterday.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.
But after extensive interviews with Hussein and his key lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that Hussein was not motivated by a desire to strike the United States with banned weapons, but wanted them to enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran, against which Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war. Hussein believed that "WMD helped save the regime multiple times," the report said.
The report also provides a one-of-a-kind look at Hussein's personality. The former Iraqi leader participated in numerous interviews with one Arabic-speaking FBI interrogator. Hussein told his questioner he felt threatened by U.S. military power, but even then, he maintained a fondness for American movies and literature. One of his favorite books was Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." He hoped for improved relations with the United States and, over several years, sent proposals through intermediaries to open a dialogue with Washington.
Hussein, the report concluded, "aspired to develop a nuclear capability" and intended to work on rebuilding chemical and biological weapons after persuading the United Nations to lift sanctions. <h3>But the report also notes: "The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam" tasked to take this up once sanctions ended.</h3>
Among the most diplomatically explosive revelations was that Hussein had established a worldwide network of companies and countries, most of them U.S. allies, that secretly helped Iraq generate $11 billion in illegal income and locate, finance and import banned services and technologies. Among those named are officials or companies from Belarus, China, Lebanon, France, Indonesia, Jordan, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Duelfer said one of Hussein's main strategic goals was to persuade the United Nations to lift economic sanctions, which had devastated the country's economy and, along with U.N. inspections, had forced him to stop weapons programs. Even as Hussein became more adept at bypassing the sanctions, he worked to erode international support for them.
Democrats seized on the exhaustive report, which comes amid a presidential race dominated so far by the Iraq war, to argue that the administration misled the American public about the risk Hussein posed and then miscalculated the difficulties of securing postwar peace.
"Now we have a report today that there clearly were no weapons of mass destruction," Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), the Democratic vice presidential candidate, said in West Palm Beach, Fla. "All of that known, and Dick Cheney said again last night that he would have done everything the same. George Bush has said he would have done everything the same. . . . They are in a complete state of denial about what is happening in Iraq."
Neither Bush nor challenger John F. Kerry spoke directly about the report yesterday, though at a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania the president emphasized that Hussein was a threat to the United States.
"There was a risk -- a real risk -- that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said. "In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."
Supporters rallied around the administration, which has suffered a string of setbacks recently with revelations that the CIA had warned the White House about the strength of Iraqi insurgents, and from former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer, who said this week that the United States should have put more troops in Iraq during the invasion.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said: "We didn't have to find plans or weapons to see what happened when Saddam Hussein used chemical and biological weapons on his own people. So just because we can't find them and Saddam Hussein had 12 years to hide them doesn't mean he didn't have them and didn't use them."
But Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said the report showed U.N. inspections and sanctions had worked in preventing Hussein from pursuing his weapons ambitions. "Despite the effort to focus on Saddam's desires and intentions, the bottom line is Iraq did not have either weapons stockpiles or active production capabilities at the time of the war."
Duelfer's report contradicted a number of specific claims administration officials made before the war.
It found, for example, that Iraq's "crash" program in 1991 to build a nuclear weapon before the Persian Gulf War was far from successful, and was nowhere near being months away from producing a weapon, as the administration asserted. Only micrograms of enriched uranium were produced and no weapon design was completed. The CIA and administration officials have said they were surprised by the advanced state of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear program, which was discovered after the war, and therefore were more prone to overestimate Iraq's capability when solid proof was unavailable.
There also was no evidence that Iraq possessed or was developing a mobile biological weapons production system, an assertion Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others made before the invasion. The two trailers that were found in early 2003 were "almost certainly designed and built . . . exclusively for the generation of hydrogen" gas.
Duelfer also found no information to support allegations that Iraq sought uranium from Africa or any other country after 1991, as Bush once asserted in a major speech before the invasion. The only two contacts with Niger that were discovered were an invitation to the president of Niger to visit Baghdad, and a visit to Baghdad by a Niger minister in 2001 seeking petroleum products for cash. There was one offer to Iraq of "yellowcake" uranium, and that was from a Ugandan businessman offering uranium from Congo. The deal was turned down, and the Ugandan was told that Baghdad was not interested because of the sanctions.
Nuclear Weapons
<b>Despite the U.S. intelligence judgment that Iraq in 2002 had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, Duelfer reported that after 1991, Baghdad's nuclear program had "progressively decayed." He added that the Iraq Survey Group investigators had found no evidence "to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program."</b>
There was an attempt to keep nuclear scientists together and two scientists were discovered to have saved documents and technology related to the uranium enrichment program, but they appeared to be the exception.
Although some steps were taken that could have helped restart the nuclear program, using oil-for-food money, Duelfer concluded that his team "uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapons research and development activities since 1991."
Biological Weapons
Duelfer's report is the first U.S. intelligence assessment to state flatly that Iraq had secretly destroyed its biological weapons stocks in the early 1990s. By 1995, though, and under U.N. pressure, it abandoned its efforts.
The document rules out the possibility that biological weapons might have been hidden, or perhaps smuggled into another country, and it finds no evidence of secret biological laboratories or ongoing research that could be firmly linked to a weapons program.
Some biological "seed stocks" -- frozen samples of relatively common microbes such as bolutinum -- were found in the home of one Iraqi official last year. But the survey team said Iraq had "probably" destroyed any bulk quantities of germs it had at the height of the program in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The team also found no evidence of stocks of the smallpox virus, which the administration had claimed it had.
Chemical Weapons
Duelfer's report said that no chemical weapons existed and that there is no evidence of attempts to make such weapons over the past 12 years. Iraq retained dual-use equipment that could be used for such an effort.
"The issue is that he has chemical weapons, and he's used them," Cheney told CNN in March 2002. The National Intelligence Estimate said that "although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents -- much of it added in the last year."
One of the reasons the intelligence community feared a chemical weapons arsenal was that U.N. inspectors said Iraq had not fully explained missing chemical agents during the 1990s. The report determined that unanswered questions were almost certainly the result of poor accounting.
Iraq's responses to U.N. inspectors regarding chemical weapons appear to have been truthful, and where incomplete, with differing recollections among former top officials, mostly the result of fading memories of when or how stockpiles were destroyed. Those were the identical reasons Iraq offered to U.N. inspectors before the war.
<b>One of the key findings of the report is that "Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a chemical weapons effort when sanctions were lifted."
The evidence included in the report to back up claims of Hussein's intent is described as "extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial." The report quotes a single scientist who reached that conclusion in hindsight and based on information he learned from the U.S. inspection team long after U.S. troops had captured Iraq.
After 17 months of investigation, the U.S. team was able to find only 30 of 130 scientists identified with Iraq's pre-1991 chemical weapons programs. "None of those interviewed had any knowledge of chemical weapons programs" or knew of anyone involved in such work, according to the report. There was one exception, the reported noted, from a scientist who maintained he was asked to make a chemical agent, but that story was uncorroborated and there was no follow-up.</b>
Delivery Systems
Iraq's secret quest to develop a more powerful missile was discovered and disrupted by U.N. weapons inspectors in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion. In the 19 months since then, the survey team has uncovered more evidence suggesting that Hussein intended to use the Al Samoud 2 and other proposed missiles to extend the reach of his military beyond the country's borders.
Iraq was allowed to continue developing short-range missiles for self-defense under the terms of the U.N. agreement that ended the 1991 Gulf War. But the Al Samoud 2, which Iraq began building in 2001, was clearly designed for flights exceeding the U.N.-imposed 93-mile limit, the new report says. And Duelfer's team found blueprints for missiles with potential ranges up to 10 times as far.
The team "uncovered Iraqi plans or designs for three long-range ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 kilometers (250 to 621 miles), and for a 1,000-km-range (932-mile) cruise missile," the report says. It adds that none of the planned missiles was in production, and only one of them had progressed beyond the design phase.
The report concludes that Iraq "clearly intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems," and maintains that the missiles, if built, could potentially have been combined with biological, chemical or nuclear warheads, if Hussein acquired them.
At the same time, the missile that U.S. military planners had most feared in the run-up to the invasion appears to have vanished. While Bush administration officials had asserted that Hussein had hidden a small arsenal of Scud missiles, Duelfer said interviews and documents suggest Iraq "did not retain such missiles after 1991."
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aceventura3, General Zinni's comments, the findings in the Duelfer report, and the spectacle of Dick Cheney's justifications for invasion and occupation of Iraq, especially his reference to "Kermal", as a justification, have to be displayed alongside the news reporting about US avoidance of destroying Kermal, and it's accessibility to Kurdish and to American forces, and to Iran, but not to Iraq, are posted in response to your postition, and opinion.
What else have you got? ....and is there anything that could be presented to you that would lessen your certainty that invading Iraq was a wise, or a justified decsion for president Bush to make?
Last edited by host; 09-12-2006 at 09:46 PM..
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