Posted on 01/28/2005 12:07:24 AM PST by The Loan Arranger
The White Houses acknowledgement last month that the United States has formally ended its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq brought to a close the most calamitous international deception of modern times.
This decision was taken a month after a contentious presidential election in which the issue of WMD and the war in Iraq played a central role. In the lead-up to the invasion, and throughout its aftermath, President Bush was unwavering in his conviction that Iraq had WMD, and that this posed a threat to the US and the world. The failure to find WMD should have been his Achilles heel, but the Democratic contender, John Kerry, floundered, changing his position on WMD and Iraq many times.
Ironically, it was Kerry who forced the Bush administration to acknowledge that it was WMD that solely justified any military action against Iraq. Before the US Senate in 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell responded to a question posed by Kerry about what would happen if Iraq allowed UN weapons inspectors to return and they found the country had in fact disarmed.
If Iraq was disarmed as a result of an inspection regime that gave us and the Security Council confidence that it had been disarmed, I think it unlikely that we would find a casus belli.
When one looks at the situation in Iraq today, the only way that it would be possible to justify the current state of affairsa once secular society now the center of a global anti-American Islamist jihad, tens of thousands of civilians killed, an unending war that costs almost 3.2billion pounds a month, and the basic principles of democracy mocked through an election process that has generated extensive violenceis if the invasion of Iraq was for a cause worthy of the price.
(Excerpt) Read more at arabnews.com ...
This is sedition. It is also giving aid and comfort to our (war) enemies.
Where's the Justice department?
I'll tell you a crime of gigantic proportions. Because of Ritter, I'll never be able to use a Burger King bathroom again.
The bastard.
"Hi, I'm Scott Ritter and I'm a child molester. Would you like to hear my opinion on anything?"
NO!
Not sure, but I think Ritter has a series of these, or this has been posted before? Anyway, a day without a ranting diatribe by Scott Ritter is like a baroque string quartet without a clarinet. :') I'll bet he wishes he hadn't spent that $250,000 Saddam Hussein gave him on the "documentary" he was supposed to produce. No chance of a sequel now. He'll have to settle for kiddie porn.
Who let that vermin out of his cage?
After watching the happy faces of thousands and millions of Iraqi's getting to vote for the first time, I'd say the Iraq "invasion" was one of the best and most righteous things the US has done in years.
In fact the more happy Iraqi voters I see on TV, the more I despise people who think otherwise.
How can a moral person (even many here on FR) think it OK to keep a people in bondage, without the right to vote or choose their own representatives?
"Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed. Based on highly credible intelligence, UNSCOM [the U.N. weapons inspectors] suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents. Iraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production." -- Ex-Un Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter in 1998
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