WMD in Iraq? Nah, nothing to see here, move along...

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I wasn't referring at all to the thousands who died because Saddam used his weapons of mass destruction on them. Weapons he had, and used, creating a record upon which the world could reasonably rely that if he chose, he could and would use them again.

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If he had them. And if he had our OK and protection in the UN to use them. Which he didn't.

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Bush began making the case for war a year before it happened. But militarily we needed to go before summer cause otherwise we'd be waiting too long (into mid to late fall). Why too long? Cause we were afraid that if Saddam had another 6 months to prepare, our troops would have been exauhsted (you can only sit so long at the staring gate)

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compare this to Gulf War I. Bush Sr took six months to assemble 500,000 troops and materiel for a successful invasion. I thought that plan was far beter than dubya's, and certainly had more justification.

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his would have been better prepared, thousands of innocent Iraqis would have been murdered

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In the no-fly zones?

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and what weapons of mass destruction he had would have been ready to use.

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Why do you keep insisting that Bush thought Saddam had WMD? He knew Saddam didn't have them. The Downing Street memo, and Bush's knowing reliance on the yellowcake forgery and the discredited WMD intelligence made it pretty clear that he was simply twisting the truth to suit his purposes.

And if you are truly facing WMD, you don't send in half-prepared troops- as ours were. In fact, if anyone had reason to fear WMD it would have been Bush Sr, when Saddam really did have stockpiles that were not either destroyed by a previous invasion or expired from over a decade of potential storage. That didn't rush his war plans, and I thought he was a lot more successful.

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Jasonzz- The article says

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U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses.

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Without saying so, this implies that the removal occurred after the invasion, because the sites had been inventoried just before.

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imagery analysts have identified 109 sites that have been emptied of equipment to varying degrees, up from 90 reported in March

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implies ongoing removal/ looting in 2005

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Okay, I'm out of this thread. You can put it all through the spin cycle as often as you want. There were no WMD.

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I said I was out, but I will make one last point. If the way you treated your inital linked article is any indication of the way you filter other information (and you were entirely wrong on your intepretation) then you have discredited your own opinions.

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Originally posted by lynchaj:
GW did the right thing and will be remembered as a great US president, probably the best in our lifetimes.

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Whoah there, pardner.
Gw is full of it.
So was Clinton.
Heck, the only recent pres we had wasn't full o' crap was Jimmy the C. And look how much he couldn't get done!
Old Money, oil, and testosterone rule. Presidents serve. Citizens obey. We bitch.
Keep voting though, some day it will matter.

This just in: WMD's spotted circling Earth in Blue Sun coffee cans! China must be invaded, says an angry President! Chrisisall

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Originally posted by Hero:
We win elections, we're winning the war.

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A new tv series is coming on this fall about soldiers on the front line in Iraq. This, to me, is proof positive that not only are we NOT winning the war, but that it's going to last at least five seaso- uh,..I mean last five more years at least!

T V doesn't lie Chrisisall

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What was all that "dual use" equipment doing in Iraq in the first place? They had no legitimate need or usage for all that WMD related equipment. Iraq's medical and/or agricultural capacities were to primitive to use more than just a small fraction of it.

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Do you have any idea what "dual use" equipment includes? PCs. Laboratory-sized centrifuges. If you read the article, they call out valves, pumps and piping. I don't know how familiar you are with normal lab or industrial operations but this is pretty standard stuff, especially for petroleum operations. In fact, our agency has a rule specifically geared towards refineries called "Valves, Pumps, Flanges, and Fittings".

Let me name you some other "dual use equipment" that- I assure you- is normal industrial stuff:

radioactive tracers- for oil field flow studies
high explosives- for mining operations
chlorine- water chlorination
bioreactors- beer, pharmaceuticals
hydrogen fluoride- refinery alkylation
ammonium nitrate- fertilization

I could go on and on by simply reviewing in my mind all of the dangerous chemicals and equipment that I am personally familiar with as a result of reviewing industrial processes. If I were to pick up the Condensed Chemical Dictionary or Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Processes, I'm sure I could come up with a lot more. When the UN calls a piece of equipment "dual use" they mean dual use: equipment and chemicals that have legitimate use in any reasonably industrial society.

If it is quantities you are concerned about, that is what the inventorying was about. If you think they may have missed traces of "bad stuff" going on- I can go in more detail on how one detects traces of chemical warfare agents (precursors or products), explosives, radioactive material, or biowarfare agents.

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So, why was it there? It had to be more economical to just buy the pesticides and medical supplies they needed off the open market rather than spend fortunes making their own substandard and very expensive substitutes

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Does the term "embargo" mean anything to you?

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The point is, just because one piece of planted evidence is misleading don't assume the whole issue is discredited.

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The point is, if Bush had such solid evidence, why did have refer to evidence that he already knew was phony?

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The real story is who planted the phony evidence

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Youre right- that is the real story. And you would think that the Bush Administraion would be passionately interested in finding out and pinning the blame on some Saddam sympathizer, terrorist, or turncoat. Instead, it seems to be a dead issue.

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Any half-modern economy is based on equipment that 'could' have a dual use.

Unless you claim that Iraq should have been boiling its water over dung, pounding copper by hand (steel manufacture being forbidden), forgoing refrigeration and lypholization (look it up), devoid of vaccines and other types of modern medicine, without batteries and electricity or petroleum products of all types including fuel and polymers, and abstaining from all the other wonders of technology, you can't make a case that 'dual use' equipment is suspect.

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I'm not sure what "tons and tons" of "pesticide-making" equipment constitutes. Batch reactors? Blanketing equipment? Dryers? What- specifically- are you refering to? But in point of fact, that Iraq had "dual use" equipment- even what seems like an unecessary amount- doesn't mean they were using it for nefarious purposes. Obviously, if that "tons" of equipment was accounted for it was at some point inspected. You can't make chemical warfare agents, bioweapons, or radiological weapons without leaving a trace. And the UN inspectors were, indded, aggressively looking for traces- a well as other things.

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I gather you believe that GW just flat out lied about the whole thing. To what end?

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Yes, I think GW flat-out lied. I can think of a couple of really big reasons, and the first is that very large chunk of untapped oil reserves- second-largest in the world- that Iraq is sitting on. That if Blix had found Iraq in compliance with UN resolutions (he was within a few weeks of isssuing his final report) Russia and France would have gotten their hands on it with billion-dollar contracts. That part of the deal was that the oil was not to be priced in dollars.

I'm not going to get into the second- you wouldn't believe me.

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