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Originally posted by Dragonlich
To *me*, it was about liberation;
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Stop right there. This thread isn't about your personal reasons for supporting the war. It's about the reasons that the United States, through offical envoys of its government, laid before the world. Liberation was not included in the case presented to the United Nations, nor did it figure even remotely prominently in the case presented to the American and world public. You have *your* reasons and you're welcome to them, but this thread deals specifically with the distortions, assumptions, and falsehoods contained in the American government's stated case for invading Iraq.
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I did address that. You see, the UN had a list of weapons that Saddam had after the Gulf War. Shortly before the war, we had a list of what was destroyed. The two lists do not match - there are items that were there to begin with, which might not have been destroyed, because Saddam couldn't prove it.
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All right, I'll try this again. You're proving my point, but you don't seem to realize it. The United States laid out a specific case to the United Nations and the world, one which hinged upon specific claims of quantities, types, and delivery methods of weapons of mass destruction. However those claims were arrived at, they have since been proven to be wildly inaccurate at best. I'll lay this out in more of a step-by-step form.
The United States claims that Saddam Hussein possesses X tons of Y substance. The United States cannot verify that the quantity or type are correct for whatever reason.
The United States demands that Saddam Hussein prove that he has destroyed X tons of Y substance.
If Saddam only has (X - 5) tons of Y substance, it will be impossible to prove that he has destroyed X tons.
Hence, a logical fallacy. Given that our estimates of his WMD capacity were so wildly erroneous, it becomes apparent that it would be impossible for Saddam to comply with the demand that he disclose destruction.
I'm surprised I have to keep explaining this; it's logic that a high-school student should be capable of grasping.
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the UN had *no* reason whatsoever to trust him on his word.
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Trouble is, it wasn't his word they were working from - it was ours. And ours, as you can plainly see, wasn't worth a whole hell of a lot.
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We know he had certain amounts of certain WMDs.
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No, we know he has or had at one unspecified point in time an unknown quantity within a range of certain WMDs. How on earth are we to expect him to prove he's destroyed it all if we can't prove - that is,
prove the quantities he supposedly had?
Do they teach formal logic in the Netherlands? I'm curious now, because this shouldn't be such a difficult point to grasp.