The Obama Phenomenon and the 2008 Presidential Campaign

Discussions of and about the historic 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
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solicitr
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Post by solicitr »

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.
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Post by Holbytla »

What would they find in the US arsenal?
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Post by solicitr »

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.
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Post by yovargas »

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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Jnyusa
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Post by Jnyusa »

sol wrote:By 'fabricated' are you claiming that Bush & Co had affirmative knowledge that Saddam had destroyed his remaining WMDs after 1998? Moreover, the specific causus belli was not the possession of WMD alone, but Saddam's repeated violations of the al-Safwan ceasefire.
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:
This regime change was necessary because Saddam was an international outlaw. He had violated the 1991 Gulf War truce and all the arms control agreements it embodied, including UN resolutions 687 and 689, and the 15 subsequent UN resolutions designed to enforce them. The last of these, UN Security Council Resolution 1441, was itself a war ultimatum to Saddam giving him “one final opportunity” to disarm – or else. The ultimatum expired on December 7, 2002, and America went to war three months later.
 
Contrary to everything that Al Gore and other Democrats have said for the last four years, Saddam’s violation of the arms control agreements that made up the Gulf War truce – and not the alleged existence of Iraqi WMDs – was the legal, moral and actual basis for sending American troops to Iraq.
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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Post by solicitr »

Just throw out a few supposed treaties and truces that no one has ever heard of...
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.
I am claiming that they had no affirmative knowledge that he had not
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"????
Our justification for war was..... that they were behind the 9/11 attacks.
Go ahead- try to substantiate that.
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Post by vison »

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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Post by solicitr »

Your Glorious Leader mentioned it several times and as I recall it was one several official stories from the Ministry of Truth.
I'll believe it when you can find a cite. Methinks you're trying desperately to shore up the threadbare "Bush lied" propaganda.
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Post by yovargas »

solicitr wrote:
Our justification for war was..... that they were behind the 9/11 attacks.
Go ahead- try to substantiate that.
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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Post by Jnyusa »

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

White House web page. Third hit on google. One of many.
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Post by solicitr »

Jny, try again. Nowhere in that speech does Bush blame Saddam for 9/11.
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Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

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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Post by axordil »

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. :roll:
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Post by Athrabeth »

It doesn't take much digging, Voronwë.

What Rumsfeld said on Sept. 11th, 2001:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/ ... 0830.shtml

Independent verification of what Rumsfeld said:

http://www.outragedmoderates.org/2006/0 ... ained.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/2006/0 ... empts.html
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Post by Voronwë the Faithful »

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 ... &blog_id=2

Here's an article from June 18, 2004, in which Bush contradicts the 9/11 report, saying:
"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda: because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Jun17.html
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Post by yovargas »

From that same article, V-man:
"This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda," Bush said. "We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda."
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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Post by Jnyusa »

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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Post by halplm »

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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Post by JewelSong »

halplm wrote:... that was not the reason we went into Iraq.
What do YOU think the reason was, Hal?
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Post by Teremia »

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.
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