Chemical Weapons in Iraq??Follow

Sure Joph. Except that quote is about a single specific piece of intelligence. So the "mobile weapons manufacturing trucks" turned out not to be what we thought they were. None of that cancels out the simple fact that Saddam had X amount of weapons, used Y amount, Z amount was divulged and destroyed, but that Y+Z is less then X.

Those extra weapons went somewhere. We can sit here and dither about where they were, and whether or not Saddam was building more or not, or whether this site of that site was a weapons storage/manufacturing are or not, but eventually you come up with a mass of evidence that says that we simply cannot account for all of the weapons we know that Iraq built. Finding even a single shell proves that all of those WMD were not accounted for. What is confusing about that?


This is one of the issues about this that has bothered me since day one. What happened is that Colin Powell listed about 50 different sources of intelligence about Iraq's WMD. Everyone went into a frenzy to find refuting evidence. Those people then proceeded to go into great detail about how 3 or 4 of those 50 bits of evidence were incorrect. Everyone then concludes that Iraq didn't have WMD as a result.

Um... What about the other 46? We did not go to war based on one piece of intel. We didn't go to war because we thought some balloon trucks were making WMD. We did not even go to war because the Nigerians sold Iraq some nuclear weapons parts. We went to war for a whole bunch of reasons, not all of which had anything specifically to do with Iraq having WMD, and of those issues dealing with Iraq's WMD, many of those have never been refuted. They've simply been ignored. "Well, we found 2 or 3 things that were wrong, so the whole thing must be...". That's horribly flawed logic.


I'm curious. At what point will you change your position? What if we track down the origin of this shell and find a dozen more? Will that be enough? What about a hundred? A thousand? How many will it take for you to be convinced? Or will no number convince you?

Well, technically no amount of shells would be a threat to the United States unless Saddam was going to send a barge of howitzers to the Eastern Seaboard and begin bombardment

What parts of the information have proven accurate? Where are the facilities and materials to make "500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent"? Where is the reconstituted nuclear program? Rumsfeld said he knew where the WMDs would be found: "in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat" -- so where are they? Where are Powell's satellite photos proving that WMDs were being moved that he told the UN he had? They weren't part of his UN presentation except in words. Powell said he had documents proving Iraq's nuclear program but the IAEA, upon reviewing them, said they didn't prove anything. Bush stood before the UN and said that he had proof that aluminum tubes found were part of a centrifuge after he was told by scientists that they were unlikely to be anything of the sort. Later, Powell said the scientists were "suprised" to find out they weren't for a weapons program after all. How about the army of unmanned drones to carry bio/chemical weapons? Bush said Saddam had them.

I said when I'd be convinced. When the administration proves that we had to invade when we did. When Bush can show that we had to invade in March or else we risked his claimed "mushroom cloud". You said Congress made their decision knowing all the facts; that's already been proven false. If Bush said "we have proof of a single (or a dozen, or a hundred) twenty year old howizter shells containing sarin", so you think Congress would have reacted the same way?

As I said earlier, maybe the administration shot itself in the foot. Maybe those facilites they allowed to be looted clean while they rushed to Baghdad might have proven the information accurate. What I do know is that they claimed a whole bunch of stuff to be truth and, so far, very little of it has panned out.

Edited, Tue May 18 22:52:42 2004 by Jophiel

That was the argument about why we needed to invade in 3/03, UN be damned.

"There is already a mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein is gathering weapons for the purpose of using them"
"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"

Is there was no imminent threat, why couldn't we have done a proper job in Afghanistan and kept resources looking for Bin Laden instead of invading Iraq post haste?

Saddam had an army of laser cannons ready to blow up the space shuttle?

Wha? That could be what it is...

I knew it was a MIRV. It was a joke, see?

The haste was because the UN was about to lift sanctions on Iraq. That meant we had a very narrow time frame in which to decide to do something, or give up any right to do anything later (until the aforementioned mushroom cloud event presumably).

See... The first Gulf War was a multi-national UN-sanctioned event. What that means essentially is that a number of nations all agree to act together against Iraq. The result of this was a cease-fire. We are bound by our coalition with a number of UN nations in this agreement, however, technically the cease-fire existed between Iraq and every nation involved in that conflict. Any nation involved in that conflict could legally have restarted the conflict at any time for any reason. That is, after all, what a cease-fire is.

What that does mean though is that if the UN agrees to transition from cease-fire status to peace-treaty status with Iraq, we are bound by it at that point. I'm not 100% clear on the veto power we possess in the UN as a member of the security council, or whether we could have prevented that using that veto power. In either case though, it's us as an individual nation determining whether we believe that the lack of compliance with the cease-fire is sufficient cause for war or not. We were pretty much at the point where we had to chose one action or the other. If we allowed the UN to settle the cease-fire with Iraq, then we were giving up any future option to attack them.


So yeah. There was an immediacy. I find it amazing that everyone makes a connection between 9/11 and Iraq, but so few people.realize that the trigger point for the Iraq was really the UNs move towards lifting santions against Iraq left over from the first Gulf war. I hate to burst everyone's bubble, but that action by the UN would certainly have occured whether 9/11 happened or not. And we'd have been faced with the same choice at that time. 9/11 gave us an additional doctrine by which to justify an attack on Iraq, and certainly made the choice easier for the administration, but other then timing, the two events are unrelated. There's every probability that we'd be in Iraq today even if 9/11 hadn't happened.

Being in the Intel field myself I can tell you Joph that intel is rarely if ever 100% accurate. The field operators collect the raw data and pass it to the analysts. The analysts take that info combine it with other sources, history, and their knowledge of the target and produce a product for the decision makers. Essentially what the decision makers get is that analysts or group of analysts best educated guess alot of the time. If the Bush administration changed that intel or ommited some of it then the case could possibly be made that congress was not full informed. However if they passed the intel that we had onto congress, just because the intel was inncorrect does not mean you can now accuse the admistration of misleading the Public and Congress. As far as the Admistration knew that was the truth on the ground at the time.

The other thing you must concider is that during the sanitization process (the downgrading of intel from one classification to another) information protecting the source is removed. It does not change the inteligence in any way it just hides where it came from. I dont know if this is the part of te intel that Congress is saying they didnt get. There are many Ints out there. SigInt, HumInt, EliInt, MasInt, FasInt ImInt... etc. Where the info came from is rarely important, and the more people who know about a source the more likely that source will be comprimised and we will no longer be able to garner intel from it. Politicians have a bad track record with revealing intel sources. ie the Bin Laden INMAR Sat phone debacle. I cant remember which politician let that cat out of the bag but he should hang his head in shame because had that source not been comprimised Bin Laden would be in a jail cell right now.

What I am saying is what you want never happens and it probably never will. The info that we get from intelligence gathering is almost never 100% accurate as it relates to the truth on the ground. That's the nature of the beast. By and large our intel agencies provide very accurate information to the decision makers however mistakes can be made. I dont know if this was a mistake or not.

There are any number of reason's the intel could have been flawed. The iraqi leadership and Saddam could have been being mislead about their weapons programs. This would have been reflected in our intel. The iraqi's know we are looking and listening they could have done things to mislead our intel assets. The analyst's may have completely F*&ked it up I dont know. The thing is you cant blame the administration for this. The government has to trust our intel services it's all we have to go on as far as information about foreign countries activities that they may be trying to keep a secret. Sitting back after the ground truth comes out as different than the intel and saying "well my vote for war is null and void because I didnt have accurate info from the intel services" is a coward's way out. The Administration could realistically do the same thing. I would be ok with it if you said knowing what we know now the WMD aspect of our going to war isnt valid. That said at the time the decision was made with the intel we had it was the right decision.

Personally with the intelligence that I have seen and have seen in the past I would have made the decision to go to war. Almost everything that I saw pointed to Iraq having the WMD. They were a threat and we eliminated said threat.

Only in preemptive war. Intelligence is 100% right if one country invades another, or lauches a missle at someone.

I don't agree with preemptive war - I am of the "do not fire unless fired upon" school.

Catapults at dawn Jophiel.

Actually, I went to far above. I do believe in preemptive war if, and only if, there is clear evidence that a nuke is aimed at my country and ready to go. Which is kind of what Tony Blair sold us.

This single amateurly rigged sarin shell makes me snort in disdain. Rather then tremble, and think how lucky I am to be here.

Patrician doesn't have any friends, though. I suppose a dead sheep might make him cry.