Mojo_PeiPei

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...and_weapons_dc

So yeah, I don't know what to make of it really. Do people honestly still believe Saddam had no WMD's? How will this be spun so that it doesn't matter to the Anti-Bush/Anti-War crowd? I hope this isn't misinterpreted as a troll, just seems many people on this board are still holding on to the notion that there were no WMD's.

Also I realize this is not a massive stockpile, but whether it is 2 or 17 122mm rocket heads with Sarin, its still something.

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Asuka{eve}

I still dont think that is justifiable though.

Boo

It was just a matter of time. Saddam (and his boys) believed they were above the will of the UN. Wait until we find one fo the huge stashes. Again, just a matter of time. I disagree with alot of the reasons that we are there and how, but I firmly believe he is a lying pig. What next, nukes, a harem of slave girls, dungeons, torture chambers and the list of atrocities can go on and on?

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wonderwench

This is not at all surprising. Saddam had 12 years to perfect his concealment and deceit.

oktjabr

To be honest, that sounds kinda small amount of chemical agent - doesn't seem very probable that Saddam was laughing evilly and hiding this arsenal of 2 - 17 rockets in order to have his retribution later.

It is very unlikely that a finding of this caliber is going to make many people think that "Gee whizz, there was WMDs after all."

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wonderwench

Please refer me to the UN Resolution which authorized Saddam to have a kinda small amount of a chemical agent. I was not aware that he was allowed to keep any.

oktjabr

Did he even know he had these?

But if we forget my opinion on this, do you think that this finding will be the great breakthrough?

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wonderwench

It depends upon the agenda of the reader. There are some people who will not believe that any amount of WMDs are enoug proof.

If the claim that these weapons were hidden from UN inspectors hold up, then this is all the proof that I require.

oktjabr

Probably, probably. Still - I would hardly qualify that finding as a tangible threat. I'm also very sceptical that this will really change many opinions on this matter.

But rest assured, I'm personally ready to admit that Saddam was a threat and had true WMD capabilities if a stash more substantial than some rusty artillery shells is found.

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Peryn

Sadly, i dont think this will change anyones minds. With that number, he only broke the resolution a little. I think at this point its kinda obvious that the people that need proof wont ever be satisfied. Also, at this point, whats one more broken resolution anyway? If all the others weren't enough for teh war, how will this one change that?

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oktjabr

Isn't that a bit exaggerating? I'm sure that most people who don't necessarily agree that couple of rusty artillery rockets with some small traces of sarin are a tangible proof that Saddam was a threat may very well admit it if a larger stash was found. The problem is that there is no exact number what this amount is, but the media blare will surely tell us if it happens.

My common sense might be flawed, but I still find it absurd if these rockets would be the WMDs behind Iraq war.

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cthulu23

This falls FAR short of the tons and tons of chemical weapons that Colin Powell named in his appearance before the UN. As has already been stated in this thread, a few warheads doesn't quite vindicate the WMD intelligence that we heard before the war. The war is over now, though, so we will eventually know the truth.

If we are so concerned about the integrity of the UN, why did we invade in defiance of UN opinion?

Mojo_PeiPei

Because the rampant corruption that rules the UN was so ridiculous, they wouldn't even enforce their own resolutions, nor were they attempting to take any steps to handle the situation as it needed (at least in our view).

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cthulu23

It's just the slightest bit disingenuous to claim that you defy the UN to support it.

Peryn

But as far as i have heard, the resolutions didn't stipulate it was only illegal if he had "tons and tons" of them. My understanding is that even the small amount we have found is more than was allowed. How badly does he have to break the rules for us to recognize they were broken?

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smooth

Everyone recognized he was breaking rules. We disagreed on what to do about it.

A large number of people felt that Saddam's regime posed no (or minimal) threat to US soil and interests without diverting our attention and sizable resources from Afghanistan to Iraq.

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cthulu23

The fact that the discovered WMDs have fallen so short of the numbers projected by the US Administration highlights the notion that the intelligence used may have been fudged or selectively chosen to inflame public sentiment rather than for it's truth. This is an important point when discussing the validity of the Administration's justifications for our invasion. the invasion may now be over, but the election makes such question very relevant.

As I was saying earlier, if we were so concerned with the integrity of the UN, why did we invade in defiance of it?

SLM3

Amazing how the story changes.

Powell had pretty pictures showing the UN and the world exactly where these stockpiles and labs were. Rummy said at a press conference that they knew where everything was, it was just a matter of getting the green light to get in there. Did the US satellites blink long enough for Saddam to make everything vanish? Copperfield would be proud. I don't buy it.

Now two 20 year old shells is enough for people to yell "told ya so?" Was this that imminent threat you were talking about? Is it really possible to find something so far after the fact that would vindicate the "imminent threat" claim?



SLM3

Moobie

Did anyone else find that story rather utterly worthless? At one point the Polish troops are showed the rockets by an Iraqi and then they buy them on the black market? Buying weapons on the black market does not make a WMD cache. Those could have come from anywhere. And why were they buying them? Why didn't they just take them? Especially since they're considered contraband.

And what was with the constant see-sawing of the article. It seemed like the Poles were making baseless statements about WMDs and then in the next paragraph some US official would completely denounce the Polish claim.

In the end they found one or two twenty year old rockets that contained enough cyclosarin to be completely ineffective against anyone. That is not a Weapon of Mass Destruction. It's a twenty year old piece of junk that some guy found in a sand dune and managed to sell to the Polish army. It would be like me finding an old rusted out musket in a field and then getting busted for gun possession without a permit.

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MSD

This is the stuff that we (the US) gave him and allowed him to use 20 years ago. A worker in a chemical weapons plant could have put a few in his trunk and sold them off to get some stuff for his family when Saddam started disarming. A black market sale does not prove that he was in violation of UN mandates. I'll wait until we find some stuff that can be confirmed as a hidden stash in posession of the Iraqi government that could have posed a real thread to the US before I change my mind and decide that the pre-war intelligence was anything other than a complete fabrication or gross exaggeration of outdated information.

brianna

i don't see how this is really proof of saddam being a threat to the USA -- did we really go to war over 17 spent shells with traces on sarin gas? if so, has it been worth it? I realize that it's possible that there are more weapons out there which *could* prove that saddam posed some threat to the USA. however, before the invasion the bush administration claimed numerous times that they knew exactly where large stockpiles of weapons in iraq were located -- this is clearly not the case and i'm not willing to forgive that lie, misrepresentation, or bad intelligence just because we've found a very small number of questionable weapons.

to argue that every country that breaks a UN mandate deserves to be invaded is a bit much -- by that standard very few countries would still be sovereign nations.

Jesus Pimp

Suddam had weapons but not of mass destruction as Bush claims. If he did he would of used them before the US invaded.

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roachboy

face it--the bush administration's jutifications for war were a joke. this falls well below any standards that were set by the un itself--including the americans before bushworld took hold---the un inspectors might well have done their jobs--the un might well have been right--the accusations of corruption might well turn out to be the john birch society crap they are (show me the proof of un corruption--seriously, show the proof) and have always been--and bushwar may well have been in fact the illegal, unjustified, immoral colonial war that its critics have maintained it was from the start.

geez...how about that?

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Moobie

I do believe that America is guilty more than any other country of breaking UN mandates. Hell it was just until the last couple of weeks that US soldiers were unable to be charged with war crimes. Because we wrote the rules and then exempted ourselves from them.

I love America, but the hypocrisy sometimes makes me wanna puke.

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Dragonlich

You probably mean the stuff that Germany made the factories for, which Saddam then produced by himself...

(Knows all about biological agents the US supplied, and has seen the lists of banned WMDs being shipped to Iraq, so don't bother to declare me ignorant.)

teph

I think it's funny that, as is fairly typical of this kind of thread, the conservatives were the main posters in the beginning, and a barrage of liberal posts come in later in the thread life.

Somewhat like talk radio, when you think about it (what points does Air America make - that's if anyone can actually still pick them up - other than "We Hate Bush?").

At any rate, you wanted proof? As cthulu23 says early on, slanted though it was, Colin Powell said that, based on our intelligence findings, we knew where the WMD's were. You know why he said that? . . . Because we did . . . we had them on satellite. Satellite photos showed them three weeks before we got to their location, and as we moved across Iraq, they were loaded into convoys and moved away, which was also shot on SAT photos. Know why you've never heard about it? Because you watch CNN or Entertainment Tonight for your news. Take a little from both sides. Oh, and if you want the typical verification of that, check out Neal's liner notes from a while back (searching WMDs might do it) at boortz.com. I'd do it myself, but, frankly, I don't care that much. Y'all have a nice night.

teph

Oh, and it wasn't 'traces'. If used to its maximum efficiency, we've found enough Sarin to kill over 600,000 people. That number's also in Neal's Nuze, but again, I don't care enough to go find it; have fun hunting on a Libertarian site .

600,000 people. That's not enough? What is, a million? Two? Ten? Pick your number . . . At first, it was a matter of not having anything at all and calling Bush a liar. Now, it's a matter of saying that, while we found some, it's just not enough . . . and still calling him a liar, this time with even less to stand on. I'm sorry, but, as a liter of sarin has the ability to kill tens of thousands of people, and as it has been shown that these Muslim terrorists are willing to hunt down Americans to kill them, what's to stop them from sneaking a two-liter canister of sarin into the US and opening it up inside a city building's ventilation system or a shopping mall? This is one thing that we're effectively slowing, if not stopping altogether.

I wonder what the argument is going to be later on, should we find any more . . .

Zeld2.0

Dragonlich you ignorant fool! Haha j/k

But I wouldn't be surprised if it were either from Germany or from the U.S. or anywhere else due ot the times

And at any rate since the story has fallen off the table all of a sudden I'm not too sure what to make of it - black market after all, reminds me of where terrorists are getting things, so who the hell knows right now?

Certainly not any of us.

soccerchamp76

Where did you find this claim that the traces of sarin could have been used to kill 600,000 people? You don't think FOX news would have jumped on that number. 600,000 is a lot of dead people to go ignored.

Maybe we should go ahead and invade every country that has a trace of chemical weapons somewhere.

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Hwed

Man, Deon Sanders in his prime couldn't keep up with the liberals carrying these goalposts down the field.

highthief

I think it is fair to say - and disingenuous to suggest otherwise, that truly satisfactory evidence will only come from the finding of munitions factories, labs or possibly a significant stockpile of weapons (though really, at this late date, the state of the country being what it has been for the last year and 3 months that wouldn't stand up to most scrutiny).

The problem that would be faced would be similar to that of a police department taking out a warrant against a homeowner on the grounds he was a drug dealer, kicking the owner out for a year, letting all the neighbourhood junkies and gangbangers do whatever they want in the house, and then 16 months later find a piece of crack in the house under the couch and say "See, see! Crack dealer!". It just wouldn't fly in court, other than possibly the court of public opinion.

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highthief

Looks like the initial reports were a little exagerated.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...iraqdig03.html

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cthulu23

Deion Sanders carried goal posts down the field?

Superbelt

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...and_weapons&ci

Another one that says the same.
They tested negative for chemical agents.

analog

I didn't know people still believed he ever had any, considering nothing has ever been found to even lead to that conclusion, let alone any WMD's themselves be discovered. In my opinion, and from the way it looks, these are leftovers from an old war- nothing more. Suggesting anything more would be bullshit rhetoric to make the shrub look good.

This might have been an interesting cheap-shot against "liberals", if it made any sense. By the way... cheap-shots like this are not the way to debate, and we recommend against it.

smooth

Damn, this has been happening for that past year.

Preliminary report hyped all over the place, then rebutted (with real evidence) once the fur flies and settles.

No apology from the conservatives for bashing liberals who were skeptical (even though it turns out they were, again correct).

/smooth sets his heavy goalpost back down and ponders why he bothered picking it up to begin with--it's not like anyone's come close to it yet

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Asuka{eve}

What would constitute as a real significant WMD anaway? I would say, working missles with chemical or biological warhead, A factory that creates such things that has shown recent use, nuclear bomb/missle, A whole arsenal of thousands of shells and bombs with chemical or biological agents in them.

Scipio

I got seven words for you:

"weapons of mass destruction related program activities"

-George W. Bush

This blog post has a good rundown. Some tfp members might have moved the goalpost a bit (from "no weapons at all" to the weaker claim of "not enough weapons to go to war over," which are sorta variations on each other), but the prime mover of goal posts lives at 1600 PA Ave.

analog noted that your post was a bit of a cheap shot, and that it was a poor argument. I tend to agree, but I think the whole issue of just where the goalpost lies is quite relevant. It might be the only meaningful question left in the thread now that we know the artillery shells are not loaded with chemical weapons.

In my mind, no amount of chemical weapons are worth going to war over. They are difficult to use, and are only likely to result in localized casualties. Just look at the Tokyo gas attacks a few years back. With those out of the way, we have three things to consider: biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. Strong, communicable biological agents are second only to nukes in killing capacity. I would say that only in the case of working nukes or potent biological agents should we go to war.

I can't justify invading a country and causing plenty of certain deaths in order to mabye prevent a chemical/radiological attack that is rather unlikely to kill more than 1000 people.

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OFKU0

If Saddam had WMD the U.S with all its sophiscated technology would have already found them. One would have thought they would of had 100% confirmation before they went in for no other reason than to look like a super power.

Secondly if WMD were on the agenda even if not already found ie,..know they are there, just haven't found them yet) , George Bush would be trumpeting that fact over and over in an election year, rather than constantly reminding the world how we are collectively rid of a tyrant and the Iraqi's are free.

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Mantus

If you read the article that was posted the US troops say:


Sarin has a life span of no more then 10 years. Case closed.

It’s pathetic that people are still jumping on these “discoveries”, especially a poorly contrived piece of gibberish as this article. How many lies must some one fall for before they learn their lesson…

As fearless leader said, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... ... ... ...wont get fooled again!"