A followup on WMD:

It's well worth reading the Iraq Study Group report, http://www.usip.org/isg/iraq_study_grou ... report.pdf, and Dr Kay's testimony to Congress, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KAY401A.html.

While it's true, as the headlines blared, that we found no WMD stockpiles in Iraq, we did find numerous res prohibitas, including

-long-range missiles, test facilities and a factory to make them

-ongoing advanced bioweapon research programs

-chemical weapon production equipment, dispersed and concealed.

The possession of *any* of these constituted a causus belli.

What would they find in the US arsenal?

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Holby:

1 We did not lose a war and solemnly agree to get rid of certain weapons

2 We have nukes and long-range missles: we're grandfathered in under the NNPT. We officially got out of the poison-gas business back in the 1970's, and I would be amazed if any of that stuff was still around, since it has a very short shelf-life. We never went beyond the preliminary research stage with bugs, because we quickly realized there was no way to keep your own troops from getting sick, too (we do keep some isolated lab strains of pathogens for antidote-research purposes).

But the essential point is No 1: Saddam agreed not to have these things, under penalty of resumed war.

Just wanted to say, sol, that though I disagree with your view of lots of this war stuff, I really appreciate the counter-perspective you bring with posts like the last few.

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

I am claiming that they had no affirmative knowledge that he had not. As for the al-Safwan ceasefire, I notice from a quick peruse around the web that this has become the new talking point for the neo-con position. A sample comment from a conservative blog:



Pretty much what you've said here, isn't it, sol?

Allow our posters to acquaint themselves with the content of those UN resolutions and see how easy it is to make things up. Just throw out a few supposed treaties and truces that no one has ever heard of and see whether anyone will go to the work of tracking them down. I have, by the way, the NYT text of our truce conditions, not in every detail of course because that would make very dry reading, even for fans of the NYT, but in the general categories of compliance demanded of Iraq. There has been no evidence offered by the Bush administration that Iraq was in violation of that truce to an extent that could not be addressed by continuation of the embargo. Our justification for war was not, in fact, that Iraq had reinvaded Kuwait, or had not returned prisoners of war, or had not removed mines put in place 12 years ago, but that they were behind the 9/11 attacks. Read the polls and see what percentage of Americans think that this is the reason we invaded Iraq.

Here are the UN resolutions against Iraq, for those with the patience to read them.

Resolution 1441

Resolution 687

Resolution 689

Resolution 1441 n particular has nothing whatsoever to do with "disarm or else." Those with memories longer than in inchworm will remember that the UN did not support our invasion of Iraq.

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A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.

Oh, come on, Jny! Contrary to your claim, there is NOTHING new about any of this and these terms and treaty provisions have been constantly discussed in legal circles for 5 years. It is they of your part who have been fixated on WMD stockpoles to the exclusion of all else, since it's such a fat target. If you haven't been paying attention, don't presume to accuse me of intellectual dishonesty.

Moreover, Safwan was binding on Iraq without reference to the UN, which was not a signatory. Any and all of the coalition powers had the right to enforce it; and, again, Safwan was a cease-fire, not a peace treaty- the state of war remained in effect (as Bill Clinton demonstrated many times).

BTW, are you seriously claiming that Saddam afforded the UN inspectors (you know, the ones he played shell-games with and eventually kicked out) "the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:

(a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;

(b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;"


There was a reason for the "international supervision" clause.

And as I pointed out before, Iraq continued with its banned missile program right up to the invasion.



Now you're just being silly. He had them before, he gave UNSCOM the runaround, and he still had them when he threw UNSCOM out. The logical presumtion follows. Your argument is "Bush couldn't prove Saddam hadn't got rid of them in secret"????



Go ahead- try to substantiate that.

Well, actually, Jnyusa doesn't have to justify it. Your Glorious Leader mentioned it several times and as I recall it was one several official stories from the Ministry of Truth. The propaganda worked, too, as an astonishing number of Americans believe it.

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Dig deeper.

I'll believe it when you can find a cite. Methinks you're trying desperately to shore up the threadbare "Bush lied" propaganda.

Those precise words probably never left Bush and Co.'s mouths I'm sure, but are you actually going to contend that that wasn't exactly what the Bush Admin. wanted the public to believe? If so, how do you explain so many Americans believing exactly that?

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases ... 007-8.html

White House web page. Third hit on google. One of many.

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A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.

Jny, try again. Nowhere in that speech does Bush blame Saddam for 9/11.

soli, are you seriously suggesting that the Bush administration never linked Saddam to 9/11? I find that difficult to believe. Cheney in particular repeated it ad infinitum, particularly the false intelligence about Atta meeting with Iraqi intelligence. Do I really need to try to dig up links to show that?

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'But very bright were the stars upon the margin of the world, when at times the clouds about the West were drawn aside.'

Let's put it this way: before it was assimilated, my company sent some care packages to the sons of employees serving in Iraq. They got certificates back from the Army with "Operation Iraqi Freedom" at the top, words of thanks in the middle, and a signature of some brass at the bottom.

Oh, and a watermark of the Twin Towers.

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Resentment is no excuse for baldface stupidity.
-- Garrison Keillor

It doesn't take much digging, Voronwë.

What Rumsfeld said on Sept. 11th, 2001:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/main520830.shtml

Independent verification of what Rumsfeld said:

http://www.outragedmoderates.org/2006/02/dod-staffers-notes-from-911-obtained.html

A Sept./Oct. 2001 timeline with examples of how the BA was linking 911 to the necessity of invading Iraq:

http://www.outragedmoderates.org/2006/02/hard-to-get-good-case-early-attempts.html

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Who could be so lucky? Who comes to a lake for water and sees the reflection of moon.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Thanks, Ath. I certainly wasn't suggesting that it would be difficult to find links. I was just questioning the need. Anyway, here's a link that talks about some of Cheney's references to the Atta/Iraqi intelligence story:

http://www.motherjones.com/mb/mt-search.cgi?tag=Atta&blog_id=2

Here's an article from June 18, 2004, in which Bush contradicts the 9/11 report, saying:



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50679-2004Jun17.html

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'But very bright were the stars upon the margin of the world, when at times the clouds about the West were drawn aside.'

From that same article, V-man:



Which I'm gonna guess is what sol is gonna say. Even if true, it's such a paper-thin. Common, sol, you can do better than this.

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I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists

It would take quite a bit of searching, I fear, to find public reference by the Bush administration to breach of "al-Safwan" as a justification for the invasion of Iraq ... beyond their repeated claim of WMDs, which would of course have been a breach of the 1991 truce if they had existed.

I find this term "al-Safwan" popping up in pro-neo-con posts on liberal websites beginning just a few months ago, and nowhere else at no time before then, always with the same claim that this is the 1991 treaty whose breach was the legal justification for the invasion of Iraq. I can find no legal or news report reference to it prior to that time, no reference to "al-Safwan" in reporting on the treaty at the time it occurred, though the terms of the 1991 treaty themselves are easy enough to find and would rather obviously contain no reference to Al-Qeyda. UN resolutions from that time are overwhelmingly concerned with affirming the sovereignty of Kuwait, which was hardly the reason for our latest invasion. More recent resolutions have to do with the continuation of the embargo, which was indeed supported by the UN and also not in question at the time of our invasion.

Of course, for those people who do not scour the news for the purpose of propagandizing websites, it would be quite easy to convince them that they had somehow "missed something," which is the great advantage held by the Tokyo Rose broadcasts out of the AEI. They have an agenda to ply and government contracts to plunder. The rest of us are just trying to stay alive in the world they've created.

There is a difference between information and propaganda. I am happy to have my website used for dissemination of the first, not so happy to have it used for dissemination of the latter.

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A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell.

Are we still on this?

You can rewrite history all you want... that was not the reason we went into Iraq.

history will prove if it was a good thing or bad... no matter what opinions are expressed right now.

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For the TROUBLED may you find PEACE
For the DESPAIRING may you find HOPE
For the LONELY may you find LOVE
For the SKEPTICAL may you find FAITH
-Frances C. Arrillaga 1941-1995

What do YOU think the reason was, Hal?

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"Live! Live! Live! Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!" - Auntie Mame

9/11 and Al Qaeda were not the reason we went into Iraq, but they certainly were the excuse.

Even in the first speech Jn dug up (which Soli didn't think much of), 9/11 is mentioned all over the place. The tactic seems to have been: Just keep putting 9/11, Al Qaeda, and Iraq in the same paragraph (or, for extra credit, sentence), and eventually people will start to think 9/11 was the work, somehow of Saddam Hussein.

And it worked.