DIYbanter - View Single Post

(Doug Miller) wrote in
:

In article . 201,
Nate Perkins wrote:
(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?

Geez, Nate, your reading comprehension just gets worse and worse. I
did *not* "admit that all the weapons were destroyed years earlier". I
acknowledged the possibility that they might have been, while
emphasizing that there was *no* UN verification of that fact.

And you completely missed the larger point of my comment, which is
that your claim that Saddam destroyed those weapons under UN
supervision is a great, fat, thumping LIE.

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."

So on your planet, "resolved to eliminate" is the same as "actually
did eliminate".

Readthat Duelfer quote again. As often as necessary to understand it.
Especially the last sentence. That makes it very clear that the former
Iraqi government was not to actually comply with the UN requirements,
but simply to *appear* to do so.

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.

You persistently miss the point. The problem is not with "the way the
paperwork was done". The problem is that, although the former Iraqi
government *claimed* to have destroyed the WMDs, there was, and is,
*no* independent verification that they actually did so, and hence no
way of knowing that those weapons were actually destroyed, other than
taking Saddam's word for it.

Bottom line: We know he had WMDs at one point, because he actually
used them. He claimed to have gotten rid of them. Nobody can verify
that claim. It's illogical to assume that the claim is true.

Your posts are nothing but a lot of silly hairsplitting. The fact is
that WMDs were the primary reason to go to war, and it's clear that
Saddam had no active WMD programs.

You want to quibble about paperwork and wording, when the intent of all
the administration's statements is quite clear. They weren't talking
about going to war because they didn't like the way the paperwork was
done. They weren't talking about chemical weapons from 20 years ago.
They weren't talking about a single old malfunctioning sarin shell.

They were talking about mushroom clouds.

Of course you will never admit that there are no WMDs. Doing so might
cause you to question whether we've wasted thousands of priceless
American lives and ****ed away hundreds of billions of dollars. So it's
easier for you to quibble endlessly.