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(Doug Miller) wrote in
:

In article 1, Nate
Perkins wrote:
"Fletis Humplebacker" ! wrote in
:
Maybe someone over there can explain in terms you
can understand that the UN had mandated that
Saddam was to destroy his WMDs under UN
supervision. Ya see, no one trusted him at that point.

Subsequent investigations have all concluded that he did exactly that,
shortly after the first Gulf War.

Ummm, no, they didn't, and, no, he didn't. What part of "under UN
supervision" do you not understand? Saddam may have destroyed those
weapons, but the UN mandated that they be destroyed under UN
supervision so that it could be *verified* that they were destroyed.
That did *not* happen.

So now you admit that all the weapons were destroyed years earlier. But
you want to claim that the invasion was still justified because the i's
weren't dotted correctly and the t's weren't crossed right?

From the letter of submission from Charles Duelfer's final report: "It
now appears clear that Saddam, despite internal reluctance, particularly
on the part of the head of Iraq’s military industries, Husayn Kamil,
resolved to eliminate the existing stocks of WMD weapons during the
course of the summer of 1991 in support of the prime objective of
getting rid of sanctions. The goal was to do enough to be able to argue
that they had complied with UN requirements."

Si I have to wonder if it really worth thousands of American lives and
hundreds of billions of dollars just because you don't like the way the
paperwork was done??? It seems to me that this is an ideal
justification for pushing continuing inspections, but not for launching
a war.

Much is made of Iraq's use of chemical weapons during the 1980-1988
Iran-Iraq war. The current administration used Iraq's previous use of
chemical weapons as a primary justification for going to war based on
the "intent" of a brutal dictator. Of course the problem with this is
that at the time Saddam was using those weapons, Reagan's administration
had quite a different take on the subject:
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/