In article . 201, Nate Perkins wrote:
(Doug Miller) wrote in
:

In article . 201,
Nate Perkins wrote:
(Doug Miller) wrote in
. com:

In article . 201,
Nate Perkins wrote:
(Doug Miller) wrote in
. com:

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,

You obviously didn't read, or didn't comprehend, *anything* I wrote.

Come back when your reading comprehension improves.


Not likely, Doug. Your quibbling, hairsplitting, and word games are a
complete waste of my time.

I'll try one more time, after which I'll be forced to write you off as
completely uneducatable.

This is not "quibbling, hairsplitting, [or] word games," Nate. This is a
statement of plain facts:

The UN mandated that Saddam destroy his WMDs under UN supervision so that
everybody in the world would know that they had been destroyed.

He didn't do that.

He might have destroyed them, he might have hidden them, he might have cooked
and eaten them. Whatever he did with them, he did in secret.

Therefore, NOBODY KNOWS what happened to them, except for Saddam and the
people working for him.

I find it bizarre, to say the least, that you assume on this basis that they
were in fact destroyed.

--
Regards,
Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt.
And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?