More on Iraq, WMD and Al Q
ABCNews has some summaries of various documents from Hussein’s archives that indicate there was a connection with Al Qaeda and OBL. And that Hussein was misleading the UN by hiding parts of the WMD program that he didn’t have.
March 17th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Any more, who cares? By now, it’s completely clear that any such programs and any such connections were insignificant at best, to the extent that the administration doesn’t even bother with the WMD / al-Qaeda stuff any more.
Bringing it up again now is just a way of saying, “See, I wasn’t completely wrong, just mostly wrong, and only about the important stuff!” 🙂
March 17th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
[…] I know that self-linking is bad blogger form, but I felt a wider comment was necessary. SayUncle links to a report talking about various Iraq WMD aims and al-Qaeda links. To which I responded: Any more, who cares? By now, it’s completely clear that any such programs and any such connections were insignificant at best, to the extent that the administration doesn’t even bother with the WMD / al-Qaeda stuff any more. […]
March 17th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Actually, if true, it proves they were right. Sorry.
March 17th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Tom may think the new information insignificant, but ABC clearly doesn’t, else their spin doctors would not have seen the need to include this disclaimer:
Then again, maybe I’m just reading too much into that. After all, news agencies disclaim stuff all the time. If you looked really, really close at your TV screen while watching 60 Minutes in 2004, you might have caught this:
March 17th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
The first document and the last document, in effect, contradict each other. The first points to possibly to cooperation between OBL and Iraq. The last one says that there are intelligence reports suggesting that members of AQ were in Iraq..which begs the question..if Iraq and OBL were cooperating why would Iraqi intelligence be reporting about possible AQ in certain Iraqi towns? You would think that if they were cooperating that Iraq would already know all of this.
If said it before and I’ll say it again…if your criteria for attacking a country is cooperation with AQ, then there are much more deserving countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
March 17th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Manish, saying a dumb thing again doesn’t make it less dumb than it was the first time around. Attacking the land of Mecca and Medina would piss off every Muslim in the world, by an order of magnitude more than invading the non-holy land of Iraq did. Attacking Pakistan or UAE – two invaluable partners in the WOT – would be dumber still.
March 17th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
Uncle:
The weather must be really, really nice in Kool-Aid Land, because you’re awfully reluctant to leave. 🙂 Why else would you embrace any shred of evidence that there may somewhere be some minor connection, while ignoring the reams of evidence that it was all blown way the hell out of proportion?
It boggles my mind how closed war supporters often are to the mere possibility that they could have been wrong. It’s as if there’s literally nothing that could come to light that would convince them that the war was wrong, or carried out under false pretenses.
March 17th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Xrlq:
I don’t think Manish was suggesting that we should invade those countries, but rather that cooperation with AQ is a dumb criteria for attacking a country. AQ is a stateless enemy, and it doesn’t need substantial state support to thrive. So attacking states accomplishes exactly what? Well, we’ve seen what it accomplishes, and it seems to help AQ.
March 17th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
“Seems” is in the eye of the beholder. To me, it “seems” that AQ can do a hell of a lot more in states that harbor it, as the Taliban’s Afghanistan did and Saddam’s Iraq offered to, than it can when every hideout and every training camp is subject to raids upon detection by the authorities. Do you seriously doubt that?
March 17th, 2006 at 7:03 pm
Sadam was in clear and unquestionable violation, for years, of the cease-fire agreement that came out of the first Gulf War and the UN was completely impotent in dealing with it. In light of that, Dubya did not start a war, or initiate hostilities. He continued an unfinished, 12 year-old war based on an on-going flagrant violation of the cease fire agreement.
Dubya was foolish to try selling the invasion as, what I called at the time, a “gun control” (WMD) issue. That was a stupid mistake, especially since Sadam had four months+ during the obvious run-up to the war, to hide, sell, give away or destroy anything he had anyway (Duh).
And lets be 100% clear on a point that the Left has been repeating ad infinitum, and that many have wrongly accepted;
The Dubya administration did not try to sell this war by claiming that Sadam was involved in 9/11. It didn’t happen, so stop trying to argue based on that assumption. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you don’t get to have your own facts.
March 17th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
First off, it looks like ABC and a bunch of other people got punked on these documents.
AQ can do a hell of a lot more in states that harbor it, as the Taliban’s Afghanistan did and Saddam’s Iraq offered to, than it can when every hideout and every training camp is subject to raids upon detection by the authorities. Do you seriously doubt that?
Going to Afghanistan was all well and good. However, if you are willing to believe that authorities in Pakistan jumped on every chance to quash AQ (or proliferating WMDs), I’ve got some swamp land in Florida that you might be interested in. AQ has many friends in the security services in all of these countries.
March 17th, 2006 at 11:38 pm
“if Iraq and OBL were cooperating why would Iraqi intelligence be reporting about possible AQ in certain Iraqi towns? You would think that if they were cooperating that Iraq would already know all of this.”
Unless AQ didn’t completely trust Iraq, and vice versa. Sort of like how Israel and the U.S. are allies but still spy on each other.
March 18th, 2006 at 12:29 am
Well, if Israel wasn’t selling weapons to the Chinese we wouldn’t have to spy on them!
Christ, they’re probably also selling intelligence on the U.S. to China.
March 20th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
What has to be shown by Bush and supporters of the invasion is that Saddam’s WMD holdings were enough of a threat to merit the sacrifice of over 2,000 soldiers and $300 billion tax dollars. These documents fall way, way short of that standard. Reality has shown that the threat posed by Saddam was much smaller than what Bushco said it was, and even the threat they promoted to sell their war was never significant enough to justify the expense in lives and dollars.
That you are trying to paint this as a black-and-white issue where all you have to prove is ‘WMD not equal to zero’ or ‘terror ties not equal to zero’ just shows how abyssmal your standards are. That sort of weak thinking is one of the reasons why intelligent and capable men and women rarely run for office anymore, and we always have to choose which sold-out, mealy-mouthed dipshit is less offensive when we vote.
March 20th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
These goalposts have feet.
March 20th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
These goalposts have feet.
With regard to WMDs, the original “goalposts” were that Saddam had stockpiles and stockpiles of WMDs and that our soldiers would be practically swimming in them when they got to Baghdad. This seems to have been changed to that any documentation that could point to Saddam having WMDs at one time (hint, we already knew this) or long forgotten about shells is good enough.
With regards to terror ties, the original “goalposts” were high-level cooperation and even possibly aiding OBL in 9/11…not some low level contact.
March 20th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Both sides have moved the goalposts quite a bit. On that, we can agree.
March 20th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Both sides have moved the goalposts quite a bit. On that, we can agree.
I don’t agree with that. My goalpost hasn’t moved. I’ve been arguing all along that Saddam likely had remnants of his WMDs, but their quality and quantity was insufficient to be a threat to the U.S. I have things I wrote in October 2002 to prove it. There has been no shortage of people trying to move those goalposts for me, of course, because that’s what conservatives do, they define their opponent’s position in stark, extreme terms, then abuse them for being extremists. It’s a simple game any dipshit can play, and most do. The invasion apologists have been moving everyone’s goalposts.
The only real challenge to my position was the possibility that Bushco had secret evidence that somehow eluded all the national and international organizations and intelligence agencies who had been monitoring Iraq. Rumsfeld said he knew where the WMDs were. There’s a goalpost for you.
March 20th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
What persimmon said. As far as I can tell, the only significant goalpost moving on the left has been by Democratic lawmakers who voted to authorize the war in the first place. For the most part, this isn’t even a left/right issue, so much as a pro-war/anti-war issue, since many on the left initially supported the war, and some on the right initially opposed it. I have extensively documented the goal post movement of war supporters, as well as where those posts were set by its opponents.
Saying that both sides moved the goalposts is like calling both a murder and a speeder “criminals.”