News Kay eats crow. The war was a lie. Kay to quit with no report made.

[Zero]

Originally posted by phatmonky
The inspections won't ever finish if they find nothing.
By the inspections process, it is the burden of proof of the inspected to deliver evidence of destruction of banned weapons. Due to this, until Saddam(in this case) offered up the evidence, the inspectors could theoretically be poking around in the sand for generations to come.

How do you produce evidence of nothing, when someone insists that you have something?

 

[member 5645]

Originally posted by Zero
How do you produce evidence of nothing, when someone insists that you have something?

It was known that the WMD DID exist! All Saddam was required to show was that they were destroyed. He showed the inspectors where he said they got rid of the anthrax, but the soil content showed no such thing.
Pictures, video, records, witnesses, soil samples, etc. Any of the two would have probably been sufficient for the UN's mandate. S Africa had no problem doing this, but Saddam couldn't.

The argument isn't whether Saddam ever had the WMD - we all know he did - The argument is, where did they go?

 

[Zero]

Originally posted by phatmonky
It was known that the WMD DID exist! All Saddam was required to show was that they were destroyed. He showed the inspectors where he said they got rid of the anthrax, but the soil content showed no such thing.
Pictures, video, records, witnesses, soil samples, etc. Any of the two would have probably been sufficient for the UN's mandate. S Africa had no problem doing this, but Saddam couldn't.

The argument isn't whether Saddam ever had the WMD - we all know he did - The argument is, where did they go?

Hmmm...have you ever pulled inventory in a large warehouse or factory? The paperwork never matches the actual inventory; this is a simple fact of life. Add that little fact to the fact that Scott Ritter, who was in charge of the inspectors up until 1998, said that they had found at least 95% of Iraq's weapons, and you have a situation where part of that 5% could easily have been paperwork error, and maybe 1-3% of the weapons were unaccounted for. Add to THAT, the fact that Iraq has been under periodic bombing for a decade, and you can see where both missing WMD and missing paperwork may have disappaered to. Plus, of couse, chemical and biological weapons have a fairly short shelf life, and they are useless after a few years.

Will continued inspections turn up some illegal weapons? Possibly, maybe even probably. What is unlikely is that the stockpiles that the Bush administration claimed ever actually existed.

 

[schwarzchildradius]

The classic strategy for politicizing intelligence is to pick out the things that support your intention. By their own admission, the white house used the exact same intelligence the Clintons used, intelligence that is obviously 4+ years old.
Yet, simultaneously, real-time human intelligence was gathered on the ground by UN weapons inspectors.

Fear of a "mushroom cloud" easily manipulated the public into supporting a pre-emptive strike on a secular sovereign nation that had never attacked America.

 

[Zero]

Originally posted by schwarzchildradius
The classic strategy for politicizing intelligence is to pick out the things that support your intention. By their own admission, the white house used the exact same intelligence the Clintons used, intelligence that is obviously 4+ years old.
Yet, simultaneously, real-time human intelligence was gathered on the ground by UN weapons inspectors.

Fear of a "mushroom cloud" easily manipulated the public into supporting a pre-emptive strike on a secular sovereign nation that had never attacked America.

Yeah! Plus, of course, the possibility that Clinton was slightly full of hot air himself. I wonder what the real time reaction the Republicans had to Clinton's claims about Iraq and WMD?

We know that Clinton(and most politicians since) lied about the reason inspectors left in 1998:

The Iraqi diplomat said Baghdad will accept non-American inspectors and continue cooperating with the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM), which performs weapons inspections and surveillance of Iraq's disarmament efforts.

Baghdad has charged the inspectors are spies sent by the United States, which Iraq accuses of being opposed to lifting sanctions.

The issue was CIA operatives who had infiltrated the inspection teams. This charge was later "confirmed"(according to some sources), but the facts of the matter certainly point to dishonesty on the part of the Clinton administration, and on the part of everyone thereafter who repeated the lie that Iraq "kicked out the UN inspectors."

 

[schwarzchildradius]

By that article, Iraq in 1997 and 2002 was deeply corrupt and needed to be checked by a military power, because Saddam was defiant of the UN. I think that Bush did the right thing in 2002 when he sent troops to Kuwait, which pressured Iraq to allow new weapons inspections. But he definitely did the wrong thing by starting the air war and ground invasion, which wasted thousands of civilians and thousands more regular army.
Bush's dad made a strategic withdrawal from Iraq, the most honorable thing Bush has ever done.

 

[member 5645]

Originally posted by Zero
Yeah! Plus, of course, the possibility that Clinton was slightly full of hot air himself. I wonder what the real time reaction the Republicans had to Clinton's claims about Iraq and WMD?

We know that Clinton(and most politicians since) lied about the reason inspectors left in 1998:

The issue was CIA operatives who had infiltrated the inspection teams. This charge was later "confirmed"(according to some sources), but the facts of the matter certainly point to dishonesty on the part of the Clinton administration, and on the part of everyone thereafter who repeated the lie that Iraq "kicked out the UN inspectors."

Zero Zero Zero, what am I going to do with you? ;)

Iraq had said it would expel the Americans inspectors if the Security Council condemned it for blocking the inspections.

Iraq was blaming us as spies the whole time.
Ritter and Butler (the leading inspectors at their times) BOTH denied there were any spies on the UNSCOM team and still do! The team WAS provided with monitoring devices, yes,but that is 100% legal under the UN guidlines that all countries in the UN are to give the inspectors any help they can. Being given monitoring equipment is not the same as spying. The closest you'll ever get to proving that there were CIA spies in the team is the new york times infamous article that relies fully on anonymous sources, no follow up corraboration, and if I remember correctly, falls back in the day (that is now shown to be) when they were making up stories to give more sensational news

The facts are:
-UN inspectors WERE being blocked from sites totally, or for hours while iraqi agents went their first.
-The UN supported us
-UN inspector Ritter was singled out as the spy, yet to this day he denies ever being a spy (although he is now one of the outmost critics of the war, but that's another debate)
-UN inspector Butler, who ran the program in the later years, says the same.
-Iraqi statements made it apparent and direct that the inspectors should leave
-We pulled out because staying in was unsafe at the time and we were being blocked

The order, announced by the Iraqi News Agency (INA), said: "All American inspectors should leave Iraq immediately until the American administration and the Security Council decide to review their irresponsible policy and their dealing with Iraq

That isn't OUR doing.

Thousands of Iraqis marched in the streets of the capital on Thursday, shouting slogans in support of the Iraqi leader. Hundreds more gathered around his main palace.

Should we have left inspectors in with that atmosphere?

The expulsion order came a day after the 15-member U.N. Security Council, by a unanimous vote, condemned Iraq, imposed a travel ban on Iraqi officials and warned of "further measures" if it did not reverse its decision to kick out the Americans.

Expulsion order referring to iraq's decision to remove all American inspectors.The UN supported us fully.




Before you respond, keep in mind I never said attacking was the right thing to do or not. I simply and pointing out the situation that led to the inspectors leaving.

 

[Zero]

What I'm getting at, phatmonkey, is that the statement "Iraq kicked out the UN inspectors" isn't true. Iraq refused to cooperate with American inspectors, but claimed that they would continue to allow inspectors from other countries to continue their work.

 

[member 5645]

Originally posted by Zero
What I'm getting at, phatmonkey, is that the statement "Iraq kicked out the UN inspectors" isn't true. Iraq refused to cooperate with American inspectors, but claimed that they would continue to allow inspectors from other countries to continue their work.

That is true, and while I hate to turn this into a semantics game, it is important.
Country of origin doesn't change the fact that Iraq was kicking out UN inspectors! Not all of them, but these weren't inspectors directly from the US. They were from the US by proxy of the UN. I know it seems a small difference, but I feel it's important to note.

 

[Zero]

Originally posted by phatmonky
That is true, and while I hate to turn this into a semantics game, it is important.
Country of origin doesn't change the fact that Iraq was kicking out UN inspectors! Not all of them, but these weren't inspectors directly from the US. They were from the US by proxy of the UN. I know it seems a small difference, but I feel it's important to note.

I understand your point, but it isn't that hard to add a couple of words to a statement to make it a little less misleading, is it? "Kicking out UN inspectoion teams" and "kicking out the American members of the UN inspection teams" are both true statements. However, there is a difference in the way each statement presents the truth.

Reminds me of the Mark Twain quote I keep running across, about how the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.