Why is The United States Still in Iraq?

Mia:

Nobody disputes that government's and their leaders across the world thought Saddam had wmd. Everyone thought that.

In fact after the initial fighting was ended Iraqi soldiers from generals on down were cited as thinking there were wmd. They were waiting for the chemical attacks, etc.

Intelligence from the rest of the world turned out to be not correct. I was gonna say lousy...but that is not the right word.

Saddam had everyone fooled including his own soldiers and even highly ranked ones.

Possibly no intelligence would have worked unless some undercover agent in his inner most circle was letting the rest of the world know what was going on. We didn't have that.

Its possible that having been weakened after Desert Storm...and possibly vulnerable to attack from places like Iran or Saudi Arabia or the West, he kept up the ruse that he was developing wmd.

Who knows? The guy was a madman. But he did surprise everyone.

Regardless. What has been found (old shells with traces of mustard gas, etc.) does not constitute what any person within a responsable position who needs to be accountable to others, would consider to be wmd.

Sources from the military have gone on record saying that Hoekstra's continued requests are wasting their time.

 

Like, I said. Hind sight is always 20/20.

 

Hindsight would be something like....we knew there weren't weapons of mass destruction. Would you still have attacked Iraq. Some people say yes and some say no.

Hindsight would be something like saying....If you knew that American soldiers would be facing more opposition after 3 years then when they first went in...would you still go.

Hindsight would be something like saying...if we knew what Iraq was gonna be like, would we have put 130,000 troops in there or 200-300,000 troops on the ground. (Crap...we may not have 300,000 troops available for ground duty--but that is a different issue.)

For d16man to claim that we found wmd and for you to support the argument basically makes a claim that every person in a responsable position within the government has denied.

What were found were very old shells with traces of chemical weapons. The traces were tracked back a dozen years or so. Every responsable person within the administration has acknowledged that is not what was considered to be wmd.

Think of this though. Suppose Saddam had acknowledged he didn't have wmd and/or chemical weapons. Suppose he acknowledged in some form that his military capabilities were dramatically weaker than before Desert Storm.

I'd bet the Iranians would have attacked him.

It is enlightening to realize how faulty our intelligence can be. That is not a blame statement....but one said in hindsight and the experience of what we have learned.

 

I'd like to see that.

Nor did they go to war claiming that only certain wmd count. I'm curious as to the use of the word "traces" though. Isn't that misleading? As I understand, shells were found with mustard gas and sarin. I didn't see any mention of just "traces." Mustard gas lasts a long time.

If, as you suggest, the mustard gas and sarin found is not dangerous, then why does the UN note:

http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/documents/6mar.pdf

Further, if mustard gas isn't dangerous after a few years, then why do we have seven facilities in the US dedicated to the disposal of mustard gas that is decades old? These facilities include: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Utah, and Oregon; disposal projects at the other two sites, located in Kentucky and Colorado.

WMD is WMD. You don't pick and choose it. There were no conditions of WMD, it was ALL WMD.

Is that why we spend billions every year here in the US to dispose of mustard gas that is decades old?

Source? I'd be interested in seeing this. In the particular time frame you speak of, Santorum was already behind in polls prior to this announcement. in fact, I covered that here in a discussion with GeorgeB when he tried to make a similar claim.

In fact, what one military commander noted:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2006/20060629_5547.html

So what Colonel Chu points out is, that while the shells in their current form could not be used as artillery rounds (as they were intended), the contents inside these shells could very easily be collected, repackaged and used in a different format with great effect. I don't know about you, but this doesn't sound like "traces" nor does it sound harmless.

So we could bring them home and set them up next a school playground, or store them in Nancy Pelosi's basement and not worry about them? I mean, after all, we have seven facilities right here in the US to destroying mustard munitions that are even older. Let's save our money and disband those facilities and just bury all that "old mustard gas that isn't a threat anymore" next to elementary schools. Something just doesn't seem right with that scenario, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

 

I'm cutting and running from this thread.

It's the right move from the right person at the right time.

Besides, I have some congressional pages on webcam right now . . .

 

Here is part of a transcript of Dick Cheney speaking to the public on national television on September 10, 2006. The Show is Meet the Press.

Cheney acknowledged that we didn't find the weapons of mass destruction that they claimed were there back in 2001, 2002, 2003.

I'll come up with a couple of other citations

 

Then I suppose you won't mind mixing some in your coffee to prove your point. To say that they are completely ineffective is a gross mischaracterization. True, sarin does degrade, but that's only after it has been mixed. Most sarin gas WMDs, including that used in the Tokyo subway attacks, start out in a two-part binary form. It doesn't become REALLY lethal until mixed. I was in Tokyo during the 1995 attack and saw first-hand what sarin can do. Subsequently, I did quite a bit of research afterward. Here is the short and simple explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin

The records have been found that prove that the bulk of the WMDs were shipped to Syria just prior to the US invasion, which is exactly what the Israelis told us. Also there was a 5 year gap where the inspectors were tossed out. Saddam had plenty of time to bury any remaining WMDs. If you really believe that there weren't any WMDs, you are living in moonbat land.

 

Apparently someone is way oversensitive because I got an infraction after my last post...but then again, I guess that proves my point. If you can't take the heat stay out of the kitchen...I'm done with this thread.

 

Wasn't your original comment:

 

We Found the WMD's!!!


The war is justified! There was WMD!!!!

 

Proving once again, he never bothered to read the report.

Don't sweat it. I've got more infractions in the last week than I've ... well, I've never had any until recently. I'm gonna be ranking up there with Nintendo soon...

 

It is a fact that shells and various armaments with old elements of chemical weapons were found in Iraq.

All significant American leaders within both the civilian administration and the military have acknowledged that what was found was not what we thought we were going to find, or what we imagined initially in 2001, 2002, and 2003. What was found was not what the Bush administration was describing when presenting the case for a war against Iraq prior to our attack in 2003.

Is there a dangerous element to what was found as you noted from the one general and with regard to your comments about leaving them by a school or in Nancy Pelosi's home?

Possibly. I don't know enough about the make up within the old shells and I doubt if you do...but as a reasonable person I wouldn't want to take them and handle them or leave them next to a school.

Could they be taken and given to a terrorist organization and become a foundation for future weapons. Again I don't know the facts about that and I doubt if you know the science and facts about it either.

If the hard facts were that what was found was seriously dangerous in that regard, you could be certain that the administration would have made a strong case for that rather than one single military officer.

The administration has not made such a case.

Continuing to make a case that there were weapons of mass destruction is stretching a line that the administration itself is not doing.

It is relatively easy to make any kind of claim about anything within the blogoshpere. We who do so are not accountable beyond what we write within a small environment. The administration must be accountable to hundreds of millions of Americans and accountable in front of a world of billions of people. There are scientists and experts that can take statements and claims and provide expertise that will shred apart unsubstantiated claims.

When the administration has not claimed that we found weapons of mass destruction even as these old shells and armaments have been uncovered then it becomes ludicrous, extreme, and irrelevant to continue the arguments that we uncovered that which we claimed we were looking for in 2001, 2002, and 2003 both before and after we entered Iraq.

 

Hmm... from your source:

 

what does some mean yo?

 

Either way it degrades after a max of several months and the crap we found was over 12 years old... it's a no brainer

 

It would be stupid for me to mix old sarin and consume it in coffee. I read the Wikipedia article you listed on Sarin, and it degrades within a short period of time. The article Mia listed stated that. This means that any old sarin that was found in Iraq cannot be called WMDs, because it cannot be effectively used. Besides, as others in this thread have stated, the Bush admin made it appear as if Iraq had much more than this.

If Israel knew that Iraq had transferred WMDs to Syria before the invasion, why is the US still in Iraq? Furthermore, why hasn't the government submitted evidence that shows there were WMDs in Syria? We have advanced intelligence agencies, and how could we not have been able to detect them shipping it out of the country?

One more thing. When the US got ready to invade Iraq, how to they slip the WMDs out of the country? Didn't US forces have them surrounded? Wasn't all the borders covered?

What no one here has mentioned yet is the impact of Depleted Uranium which the US military is using in Armor and ammunition. This stuff is the real WMDs, and the troops coming home are going to be dying from in the next 15 years. Depleted Uranium as a half life of 4.5 billion years. Why is the US military using it?

 

So, by letting the WMD just slip away to another "evil" crappy country america has failed yet again, to do anything they set out to do. *snickers*

 

Oh my, you scared me to death!

After checking the maps, not, United States is still between Canada and Mexico

 

its becoming painfully obvious that some people just cannot see reality and its impossible for them to admit they are wrong

you guys are like one of relatives who insists that saddam was behind 9/11 because he just "knows", nevermind the 9/11 commission, nevermind the presidents own words, he "feels" that saddam was behind 9/11 so that is good enough to kill everyone in Iraq

Its kind of disturbing really, you wonder how things like Nazi Germany happenend, I thinks its more suprising that it doesn't happen more often.

 

No one in the Bush admin ever said that Saddam was behind 9/11. There you go re-writing reality again.