Tell it to them...
Halabja Sarin Gas Victim
First, cards on the table - I was convinced that SH had (actual, ready to use) WMD and supported the war. Second, regardless of this debate the allies have done the world a massive favour by removing this POS from power and putting him on trial.
However - I have long since accepted that the whole intelligence community lost the plot somewhere around the millenium and made a judgement then looked for evidence, rather than looking for evidence then making a judgement (the first will alwasy be a self serving cycle - particularly if you throw enough money at it).
Had Saddam have had WMD in any significant quantity he would have used them when we invaded. The war could only end with his loss of power which is the same as his death to a dictator. He didn't and he ended up in a rat hole then facing the hangman.
Had we have given up sanctions, taken our eyes off him, not invaded at some point in the future would he have started building WMD again? Yes. Was he lunatic enough to use them if he did? Yes. Am I therefore loosing sleep over this issue? No.
However, I think war supporters need to be careful over how we debate this issue with non war supporters to win the argument. To doggedly stick to claims that somehow all these WMD were there sounds like tin foil hat stuff now. Yess, we can point to the links of some stuff that looked like it may have been used for WMD, or stuff that was left rotting from the Iran-Iraq war era, but this is not what our intelligence told us was there. The President hit the tone exactly right when he made his speech earlier in the week. We should all follow his example.
I don't care about any debating with communists (aka the democRATS and Code Pinkos etc). They are not worth the effort. Do what it takes to win the war and let them make @sses of themselves.
Tell it to them...
Halabja Sarin Gas Victim
http://www.foia.cia.gov/duelfer/Iraqs_WMD_Vol3.pdf
He did have WMD.
Even ONE sarin or mustard gas shell is proof.
I respectfully disagree.
These are children's remains in Halabja.
This is what would have happened to the people of Baghdad if Saddam had tried to use his WMD's. I am sure the Russians talked strategic sense into Saddam.
Here is a Heritage Foundation commentator's analysis, basically explaining before the fact, why your projection as to Saddam's likely response did not come true (not that he wasn't ruthless and cruel enough to do so)... but that Saddam recognized it was militarily counterproductive.
[ I surmise Saddam's whole strategy was what we have seen, a gamble on the jihadist insurgency guerilla war tactic instead, and for the marxist Soviet-era Fifth Columnists in the West to carry his water for him....which they did in spades. Trying to undermine the Western governmental hawks. ]
Remember the IMMEDIATE Left Wing brou-haha over the unfound WMD's? Even burning their agents in place in the CIA and State Dept. like Valerie Pflame and Joe Wilson?!:
Highly relevant are the considerations laid out by Dexter Ingram, the Heritage analyst, reported well before the Battle for Baghdad:
We recently used a Department of Defense computer model that analyzes the consequence of a nuclear biological or chemical attack (one that accounts for population and weather) to consider one possible scenario. The scenario showed 75 artillery rounds carrying VX nerve gas launched within 10 miles outside of Baghdad under current weather conditions would have little or no effect on coalition troops, but up to 2,200 unprotected civilian living along the Tigris river would be killed and another 33,000 could be injured.
Another danger would be posed to the regular Iraqi army. Depending on the weather, they could find themselves being exposed to an agent released by their own leadership. The ill-prepared Iraqi army is spread throughout Iraq with little or no means of communication, thus making them vulnerable to a breeze carrying sarin gas or some other nerve agent.
Unfortunately, they wouldn't be alone. Such an attack could affect tens of thousands of people, depending on the weather and how the wind is blowing during a release. Most of those killed and badly hurt by whatever poisons Hussein uses would undoubtedly be the men, women and children who live in and around Baghdad.
As Saddam well knows, civilians have no protection against chemical or biological assault. But coalition troops do. Which raises a chilling possibility: That the Iraqi dictator could well decide, now that no hope of escape exists for him and his inner circle, to deploy the ultimate "scorched earth" defense. If he does, God help the poor people of Iraq.
Yes, we need to carefully, and with unceasing vitriol denounce the BIG LIE that he didn't have them. Goebbels would have been proud of these truth-denying scum...
This is seriously misrepresenting the facts.
Richard Miniter's book Disinformation gets it right. He documents the Big Lie campaign.
The only way we fail in the PR war for the truth is to fail to fight...or to unilaterally disarm as Colin Powell and George Tenet had GW doing. Powell and Richard Clarke also persist in reiterating these sniping attacks against the facts.
Some key findings totally undermine your thesis with regard to our intel deficiency. The answer is prosaic, and all the more embarassing because it is in plain sight. Saddam, and his Russian advisers, were simply more clever and cunning than the American MSM Left gives him credit for.
Some telling points from Disinformation (although it should be pointed out that 9 miles of Iraqi Intel docs remain unreviewed, and Kay's team never left the Green Zone according to soldiers on the ground):
David Kay
Kay ran the Iraq Survey Group, a 1,400-man team charged with scour-ing Iraq for stockpiles of WMD. He did not find any. Yet he told a joint session of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in October 2003 that the Iraq Survey Group had “discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq had concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002, including chemical, biological, and nuclear experi-ments.” Kay testified that Iraq had tried to obtain missiles from North Korea on several occasions. He also said that his work was hampered by “six principal factors,” of which the first two were that “from birth, all of Iraq’s WMD activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program,” and “deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans-to-post conflict.”26 What was being dispersed and hidden if there was “no evidence” that Iraq had WMD?
Even anti-war opponents such as Hans Blix's own report makes it clear that something is amiss with regard to the supposedly nonexistent WMD's:
They point to lack of evidence and inconsistencies, which raise question marks, which must be straightened out if weapons dossiers are to be closed and confidence is to arise.” If one keeps reading Blix’s reports, darker realities emerge. The inspectors could not account for Iraq’s 6,500 chemical weapons (which were missing) and couldn’t prove that Iraq had destroyed the anthrax it admitted it had produced. In short, according to Blix, some WMD were most likely still in Iraq’s arsenal. Blix said that inspectors had found evidence that Iraq had been producing VX nerve gas as well as a “mustard gas predecessor,” thiodiglycol.
Here instead is what NEEDS to be trumpeted in Presidential Televised Awards conferences...in PRIME TIME..., with MEDALS to the officers:
Polish general Marek Dukaczewski, Poland’s military intelligence chief, revealed that troops in the Polish-patrolled sector of Iraq had received tips from Iraqis that chemical weapons were sold to terror-ists on the black market. The weapons had been buried to avoid detection, the general told the BBC.5 Polish military officials bought seventeen chemical-weapons warheads from Iraqis for $5,000 each to keep them from Iraq’s so-called insurgents.6 “An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine,” the general said. “All of our activ-ity was accelerated at appropriating these warheads.”7 Tests confirmed that some of the warheads contained cyclosarin, a nerve agent five times more powerful than sarin. These chemical weapons were sup-posed to have been completely destroyed during the 1991–1998 UN inspector regime. Clearly, some WMD survived.
➢U.S. soldiers stormed into a warehouse in Mosul, Iraq, on August 8, 2005, and were surprised to find 1,500 gallons of chemical agents. It was the largest chemical weapons lab found in Iraq.8 The intelligence community remains divided over the origin of those chemical weapons (either from inside Iraq or outside) and whether they were made during Saddam’s regime or after.
➢When a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. convoy on May 17, 2004, it was found to contain the nerve agent sarin.9 Army Brigadier Gen-eral Mark Kimmitt told reporters that an “improvised explosive” was rigged to a 155 mm artillery shell that contained sarin. The shell was a “binary chemical projectile,” in which the two ingredients that pro-duce sarin are separated by a propeller blade that spins while the shell is in flight, mixing the deadly gas to full potency. Since the chemical weapons shell was used as a bomb, and not fired from the barrel of an artillery piece, the internal rotor did not spin and the deadly agent was not widely dispersed. As a result, Kimmitt explained, only traces of sarin were produced and released. The soldiers were briefly hospital-ized and decontaminated. Again, all such chemical weapons warheads were supposed to be destroyed in 1991—yet Saddam’s WMD still threaten the lives of American troops to this day.