2008 US Presidential Election - Page 79

On September 29 2008 05:57 Servolisk wrote:


Can we end this vague bullshit?

Define legitimizing. Legitimize to who? What will they do differently afterward? What consequences are there?

On September 29 2008 06:11 D10 wrote:


USA will become the next islamic Caliphate!!!!!!!!!!!11

On September 29 2008 05:31 Jibba wrote:
We really did think they had some amount of WMDs left, although I think they were irrelevant to us invading or not. We expected a chemical attack on soldiers entering the Karbala Gap into Baghdad, which is why we spent a shit load of money vaccinating soldiers and giving them the proper supplies for gas attacks. It never came because Sadam never bothered to rebuild them after Desert Fox, but in hindsight there was no way for us to know that. Sadam's own GENERALS didn't know that. They asked for access to them and when they found out they didn't exist, they basically retired on the spot. That's the #1 reason rolling into Baghdad was so easy - they had already given up by that point.

Democracy in Iraq was a very serious motive, likely the most important motive. Say what you will about oil, but Saddam was always a willing trading partner. If we could install a healthy democracy in Iraq, it would create another country that could lead diplomacy and negotiations, and other populaces would start itching for the same type of freedoms. Unfortunately, you can't force a political system on a group with a shattered social structure/economy/lifestyle/etc. and the DoD should've known better.

BTW this site is incredible. PBS fucking owns.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/invasion/

raq disarmament crisis (2002-2003)

During the Iraq disarmament crisis before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Blix was called back from retirement by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to lead United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in charge of monitoring Iraq. Kofi Annan originally recommended Rolf Ekéus, who worked with UNSCOM in the past, but both Russia and France vetoed his appointment. Hans Blix personally admonished Saddam for "cat and mouse" games and warned Iraq of "serious consequences" if it attempted to hinder or delay his mission.

In his report to the UN Security Council on 14 February 2003, Blix claimed that "If Iraq had provided the necessary cooperation in 1991, the phase of disarmament -- under resolution 687 -- could have been short and a decade of sanctions could have been avoided."

Blix's statements about the Iraq WMD program came to contradict the claims of the George W. Bush administration, and attracted a great deal of criticism from supporters of the invasion of Iraq. In an interview on BBC TV on 8 February 2004, Dr. Blix accused the US and British governments of dramatising the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to strengthen the case for the 2003 war against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Newt Gingrich stated that approving Hans Blix as chief UN weapons inspector was one of the biggest mistakes the United States ever made.

In an interview with London's Guardian newspaper, Hans Blix said, "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media".

In 2004, Blix published a book, Disarming Iraq, where he gives his account of the events and inspections before the coalition began its invasion.

Ultimately, no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were found.

Hans Blix said he suspected his home and office were bugged by the United States, while he led teams searching for Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Although these suspicions were never directly substantiated, evidence of bugging of UN security council representatives around the time the US was seeking approval from the council came to light after a British government translator leaked a document "allegedly from an American National Security Agency" requesting that British intelligence put wiretaps on delegates to the UN security council.

On September 29 2008 06:19 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
If that were the case I'm sure that title would go to France.

On September 29 2008 06:51 Boblion wrote:
I think i trust more Hans Blix than the people i have named. But well it is my opinion
/end off topic

On September 29 2008 06:45 Jibba wrote:
Do you really trust UN inspector reports? Doing so would be far more naive than anything I said. The UN is a shell. Why are you even citing IAEA? We're not talking about nuclear weapons.

We prepared our troops for chemical warfare, which constitutes a belief that WMDs still existed. You can look through war records if you'd like. The RNG's generals thought they had them too.

Iraq agreed to the Resolution on 13 November.[citation needed] Weapons inspectors returned on November 27, led by Hans Blix of UNMOVIC and Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The inspectors had been absent from Iraq since December 1998 when they were withdrawn immediately prior to Operation Desert Fox

Inspectors began visiting sites where WMD production was suspected, but found no evidence of such activities, except for 18 undeclared 122mm chemical rockets that were destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision.

On September 29 2008 11:16 BlackJack wrote:
The thought that only the U.S. believed Iraq had WMD isn't quite accurate British, German, French, Russian intelligence all believed Iraq had WMD. Hans Blix even said it was his gut feeling that Iraq had WMD.

On September 29 2008 11:16 BlackJack wrote:
The thought that only the U.S. believed Iraq had WMD isn't quite accurate British, German, French, Russian intelligence all believed Iraq had WMD. Hans Blix even said it was his gut feeling that Iraq had WMD.

On September 29 2008 15:51 Jibba wrote:
The US lost a hydrogen bomb off the coast of Spain, fyi for anyone living there! Literally the carrier went down and the recovery effort failed, so gl to anyone that can reach it!