Posted on 04/07/2017 6:17:51 PM PDT by Starman417
Let’s do a quick re-cap on the past 27yrs of America’s War in Iraq (1990-2017):
1990-Iraq had the 4th largest army in the world (about the size of Spain, Italy, France, and Britain combined). They had chemical, biological, and were working on making an atomic bomb (even had the bomb ready, but not the radioactive material).
1991-Iraq was invaded by a United Nations Coalition of forces, driven from Kuwait, and forced to agree to terms of surrender; terms which included getting rid of WMD.
What’s WMD? WMD stands for Weapon of Mass Destruction. It’s a term often used to describe chemical weapons, biological weapons like weaponized bacteria, radiological weapons like dirty bombs, and atomic bombs. It’s a lot easier for people in power to just say, “WMD” than all the rest. The United Nations calls them, “proscribed weapons;” meaning weapons that are too horrific to use because they kill 100% indiscriminately, their use almost certainly causes civilian casualties, and people don’t just die when they’re used…they die extra slowly and painfully.
This is where things get tricky. Just like war-wagers like generals, and U.N. diplomats prefer the acronym “WMD” to the long list of really bad weapons, so too do politicians, mass media, and people prefer to use it too. There’s a problem with that, however. In March 2003, after 6+ months of political and military buildup, the United States invaded Iraq, and unreported/hidden WMD in Iraq was one of the many reasons given for the invasion.
Politicians debated if there was a WMD threat. That meant the mass media would debate it, and the rest of us wind up debating it too. For 14yrs the debate about Iraq and WMD has continued. Kids who were 4 when the nation was invaded are 18 now and being sent into Iraq as soldiers, and the debate continues: did Saddam have WMD/was Iraq a WMD threat?
In late 2002, half a year before the invasion, the Bush administration claimed that Saddam was a WMD threat. They said there had been no U.N. WMD inspections in Iraq for 4 years (since Saddam kicked the U.N. out in December 1998). He was right on that. What he didn’t tell the world was that in those 4yrs the U.S. didn’t have a single spy inside Iraq-not one! The last thing anyone knew about Saddam’s WMD program (according to President Clinton) was that after the December 1998 American bombing campaign on Iraq, much of their WMD threat was reduced, but it was not 100% destroyed. Moreover, the Bush Administration showed satellite pictures of the WMD facilities that had been hit in 1998, and had been rebuilt by 2002. They didn’t know what was going on in the buildings because there were no U.N. inspectors and no U.S. spies in Iraq during those 4yrs.
The Bush Administration’s WMD-threat-argument was based on very limited information. His speeches reflected this. If you go back and read them you’ll see that not until the eve of the invasion did he really start saying, ‘Iraq has this WMD and that WMD.’ Instead it was always, ‘Iraq had this sort of WMD, and they haven’t accounted for it with the U.N. Most of the Bush administration claims were of missing or unaccounted for WMD; weapons that Iraq told the U.N. it had, but had not told the U.N. if or how they were destroyed.
A lot of people didn’t trust President Bush. He had come to power in a legal coin toss. He had lost the popular vote. He came to power after a politically divisive impeachment. He lacked the charisma that President Clinton had before him. The 911 attacks divided the country even more, and vengeance for those attacks was swift, but hadn’t satisfied the American people at the time; not with Bin Laden at large. People felt that one war was enough for America. People feared getting involved in the Middle East. People feared, period, and support for holding Iraq to account for such dangerous weapons was not supported. Oh, people supported sending in U.N. inspectors, but that was it, and that wasn’t enough. There was no reason for Iraq to comply with U.N. Any refusal on Iraq’s part in the past had only met with a few airstrikes as punishment, and they expected the same (Saddam said so himself). Bush may have been threatening invasion, but the popular opposition to an invasion reassured Saddam that he was safe. Opposition to the war destroyed the “credible threat of force” (as the U.N.’s chief inspector, Hans Blix, later said).
Given the political and cultural reluctance to believe the Bush administration might invade, many dismissed his casus belli one after another. The Bush administration’s list of WMD allegations and concerns was dismissed from 2002-2017 by many people. For that reason, let’s ignore what the American government’s Iraqi/WMD accusations were, and instead focus on the United Nations’ Iraqi/WMD concerns.
On March 6, 2003 the U.N. inspectors gave a report called, “Unresolved Disarmament Issues.” It’s a 175 page list of “proscribed weapons” (what we call WMD) Iraq had openly declared it possessed. After each “WMD” item, the U.N. explained several different ways that Iraq could resolve the “WMD” issue and remove any concerns the U.S.; remove that from the list of reasons for an invasion. Each of those ‘ways to resolve’ a “WMD” issue ended with the mere request for just an explanation. Iraq could have written a paragraph for each item and met the U.N.’s declared concern. Instead, undeterred by the Bush Administrations threat to invade, confident that popular support would compel any response to mere airstrikes, the Iraqis refused to explain what had happened to the WMD they once possessed.
Forget what the Americans claimed, here’s a short, partial list of what WMD the U.N. claimed Iraq still had just before the invasion:
When Saddam’s Iraqi government fell, a statue fell. There were cheering Iraqis in many places, not in all. The world watched TV and the image of success was looting. The American people, and the world, had come to expect some sort of footage of WMD; some sort of ‘ah-ha!’ moment. Lacking that, the debate continues to the day. Many political pundits still claim NO WMD was found, but that’s not entirely true. Not all the U.N. or Bush Administration WMD claims were true, but neither is it true they were all false.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net ...
Can we believe Israel? They say they have been watching this specific Syrian pilot for years.
Special Middle East report on the chemical attacks in Syria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsBchlbdJdc
Pretty good article about the WMDs that were found in Iraq. Quite a few pictures.
If the Establishment Media had not been completely out to destroy Dubya Bush, they would have admitted that WMDs were found. It was just that Saddam lied to everyone to maintain control. He did not have as much or as varied WMDs as we thought, a fair amount was destroyed through incompetence, and he could not keep his nuclear program going.
So, we had an intelligence failure on how much of a WMD threat existed in Iraq.
Of course, if we had not invaded, Saddam was all set to gain access to enormous oil proceeds and to start everything up again.
Yes, Iraq had chemical weapons or at least the ability for “rapid restart” as the article says.
This would be especially true in the Middle East -- where some countries maintain their own nuclear weapons programs in defiance of "international law," and others aren't even bound by some of the international treaties that cover various types of WMDs anyway.
The chem WMDs may be those that our ‘friends’ (according to the FR Putinistas) in Russia reportedly snuck out of Iraq and into Syria just prior to the Gulf war.
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“Romanian intelligence defector Ion Mihai Pacepa alleged that an operation for the removal of chemical weapons was prepared by the Soviet Union for Libya, and that he was told over thirty years ago by Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Yevgeny Primakov, about the existence of a similar plan for Iraq.
It is ‘perfectly obvious’, wrote Pacepa, that the Russian GRU agency helped Saddam Hussein to destroy, hide, or transfer his chemical weapons prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. ‘After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place.’[13]
John Loftus, director of The Intelligence Summit, said in the November 16, 2007 issue of FrontPage Magazine that many documents from Iraq point to WMD being transferred to other countries such as Syria: ‘As stated in more detail in my full report, the British, Ukrainian and American secret services all believed that the Russians had organized a last minute evacuation of CW [chemical] and BW [biological] stockpiles from Baghdad to Syria.’
His researchers allegedly found a document ordering the concealment of nuclear weapons equipment in storage facilities under the Euphrates River a few weeks before the invasion.[14]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMD_conjecture_in_the_aftermath_of_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq#Alleged_Russian_involvement
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Getting rid of these dictators is bad news.
If Assad falls and ISIS sympathizer will take control, and all those WMD’s will get used in the west.
I remember numerous posts on FR, back in the Bush days and later, alleging that Saddam’s WMD were taken to Syria.
A blast from not-so-past:
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2012/07/14/and-where-did-syrias-chemical-weapons/
The U.S.A. is not Iran. It is not Syria. It is not North Korea.
This is the false “all cultures are equal” concept. They are not.
Of course, Iraq under Saddam did not abide by its treaties, and it did not abide by the ceasefire agreements from the first Gulf War.
I will say, the U.S. has not followed its treaties to the letter either. Treaties have been shown to be poor protectors. President Clinton pushed NATO to attack the Serbs, directly against the NATO Charter.
The problem with Iraq was that it presented a threat to many other countries, not by direct attack, but by the reasonable potential to arm non-state actors, where a nation could not be held accountable.
Invading Iraq made sense; Saddam could not be trusted. Invading Libya was stupid; Gadaffi showed that he would work with the rest of the world.
The “all cultures are equal concept” leads directly to Globalism, with every nation having one vote. No thanks.
I also recall several stories in 2003 in the weeks before the US invaded Iraq that the UN had determined that large convoys of semi-trailer trucks were seen heading from various places in Iraq to Syria, around 1,200 of them. That story seems to have since been purged from the record as searches for it pretty much come up empty. Maybe it was legitimately debunked but I haven't seen that explained anywhere. Curious whether anyone else has that recollection and knows what happened to that information since. Interestingly, one of the pics at the end of the linked article seems to show a large number of trucks lining up to convoy out.
I don’t think the question is where the weapons are. The question is who controls them.
My issue is with the on-going denial by the left that WMDs were ever there. Of course they were there, but many on the rabid left are trying to purge the record in order to keep their false narrative going and to establish a false history.
That’s what I remember as well.
This account has been banned or suspended.
[[If the Establishment Media had not been completely out to destroy Dubya Bush, they would have admitted that WMDs were found.]]
Actually the NYT did admit it- years later- after they LIED for so long about george bush
“BOMBSHELL: New York Times Reports WMDs WERE Found in Iraq!
Read more: http://thepoliticalinsider.com/bombshell-new-york-times-reports-wmds-found-iraq/#ixzz4dcrTEoci
“
The New York Times shockingly admitted in an explosive front page report that thousands of WMDs were found in Iraq since the start of the war:
From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.
In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Read more: http://thepoliticalinsider.com/bombshell-new-york-times-reports-wmds-found-iraq/#ixzz4dcrgGvrk
Yes. I remember it well.
That would only happen by assuming Putin would allow ISIS to take control denying Russia their only warm water port. Think he would?
I seemed to recall before\after satellite pictures of the truck traffic.
Found a lot of articles, few photos. No dated before\after.
No context to the photos. How can I\we know what is said about photos is true ?
http://directorblue.blogspot.in/2007/07/iraq-wmds-and-truth.html
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