Breaking News: WMD's Found

Oh, man...this is entertainment!
Just so I've got this straight, 500 rusty artillery shells collected over a 3 year period containing either A) nothing B) inert chemicals or c) degraded munitions.....now counts as WMDs? :rolleyes:

Well, I for one am certainly glad we invaded Iraq and collected them. Who knows what he might've done with 'em? Maybe stubbed his toe or sumpthin'....

Word to the wise, fellas: Don't get your hopes up. This makes better comedy material than vindication.
 
When President Bush talked about WMDs he was refereing to strategic weapons that could reach the United States in less than an hour or nuclear weapons not tactical weapons. This is not the first time chemical artillery munitons have been found in Iraq.

So show me the WMDs........im still waiting
 
Sodbuster, does it really matter who made the announcement as much as where the data came from? Allow me to refresh your memory: Declassified DOD documents.

One should really be wondering what else is in those documents that weren't declassified.

GoSlash27, you really should research what "deteriorated" mustard gas is... Hint: It's worse than the original stuff.

But lets not have reality intrude upon our rants!

dev_null said:
It's not "breaking news," it was reported when they were found. If it was the smoking gun, you can be sure the administration would be all over it.
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And just like the "first" time, this will be glossed over by the MSM. Go look in THR's archives. You will find I reported this stuff back then, and it was pooh-pooed by everyone at the time, even the supporters of the war that nearly ran me off the board because I was against the war in the first place.

In every single instance that something was found, the following mantra was spread far and wide by the MSM: "These aren't the weapons we were looking for."

In every single instance.
 
I support the war not because of WMDs, simply because that its something we must finish. The reasons the adminstration gave for rushing to war are like the answers on a multiple choice test question. Folks from President Bush down have admitted publicly that they made mistakes. It was obvious that the administration had only planned as far as winning the initial war. Planning for after the war was flawed because the players had on some rose colored glasses.

Im still poo-pooing the WMDs unless they are strategic or nuclear.

we will have to agree to disagree on this.
 
I support the war not because of WMDs, simply because that its something we must finish.
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The problem with that is that there is no objective, reliable benchmark to let us know it's "finished". When is the job done? When Iraq has an elected government and security forces of its own? (They do.) When all the insurgents are gone from Iraq? (They will keep replenishing as long as there are Americans in Iraq.) I simply don't know at what point the President can proclaim that the job is done, and our buys and girls can come home. It'll end up like Vietnam, when the successor administration looked for an opportunity to proclaim that "they have things in hand now" and order a pullout with the semblance of saving face.

I really wish there wasn an easier solution to the problem, but there isn't. I just don't want to take my son to D.C. in fifteen years and see another black wall with a few ten thousand names on it.
 
Antipitas: I repeat, if this was the vindication, Shrubya and Condi would be all over the news. These are the same old, rusting, pre-1991 munitions that were reported when found, and buried not because of some vast left-wing Illuminati, but because it isn't what they were looking for. It's kind of like obtaining a no-knock warrant on a suspected meth lab and finding an old bag of pot seeds and stems someone left in a drawer last year. Illegal? Yes. Smoking gun? Get real.
 
if this was the vindication, ...it... would be all over the news.
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Not in the media I'm familiar with...

Everything you said makes good sense... except this... :rolleyes:

BTW
What constitutes MASS to you...?
Wasn't the sarin attack in Japan MASSive enough for you?
Why must it be nuclear...?
If it kills a million people...?
Is it still MASSive if it doesn't destroy the city?
Is 10 megaton enough to qualify for MASS destruction?
Does the "pre-1991" "expiration" date matter to the victims?
Why should it matter to... us?
:p :p :p :p :p

Marko Kloos
Do you care...even a smidgen, about the Shiites who were being tortured and murdered, tortured and raped, tortured and buried alive in MASS graves?

It is odd how liberals just "dance" around that subject as if it doesn't exist...
But then, liberals only see what they want to see...

...and the timing is always in their favor.
 
Pointer,

I am not a Liberal.

About the Shiites in mass graves...we didn't seem to care too much about it when it happened right after Gulf War I. If we went to war again to get rid of Evil Saddam and keep him from killing the Shiites, we went about ten years too late to save those. Also, we didn't moan too much when he gassed the Kurds...as a matter of fact, he was still on our "Friends" list back then, because he was fighting people we liked even less (the Iranians).

Also, explain the following to me:

North Korea has admitted to having nukes, and they have a fully fueled three-stage intercontinental missile right now sitting on the launchpad that has the range to reach Los Angeles. If it's all about keeping crazy dictators from getting and using WMDs against us, why aren't be bombing the stuffing out of North Korea right now? That guy is a crazy dictator, too, and he oppresses his people even worse than Saddam ever did.

Face it, all the justification advanced for the war has been retroactive evidence alignment. Talk about seeing only what you want to see.

And yes, you can be anti-terror and pro-military, but still oppose the strategy of the CINC and yet not be a liberal. I fully support the War on Terror, but I disagree with the way it's been fought, that's all. Iraq was unnecessary, and it has cost us many troops and much money that could have been used far more effectively than deposing Saddam and using our taxpayer dollars to shore up alternating sides in a religious civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.
 
The sarin gas incident in Japan may not be the best example - unless 12 dead people constitutes "Mass" casualties. True, more than 6,000 people ended up being treated - but unless someone can tell me that even 25% of those people had serious symptoms then I just don't think I'd consider that attack of "Mass" proportions. They tried - just didn't work out that way.

If we want to consider the possibilities, then yes - I suppose we could have called that a Mass attack.

As for the people who were being buried in the mass graves - those graves were not one of the given reasons for our invasion, so that argument is moot in this particular conversation.

The weapon doesn't have to be nuclear - however it really does need to be strategic in nature - the method of delivery is indeed important, because (Americans should be able to appreciate this) there are degrees of guilt. Does finding chemical weapons mean that Saddam was in violation of U.N. sanctions? Yes. Does it prove that he had the capability or intent of using those weapons against countries other than his own? No.
And - let's be honest - THAT was the reason we invaded, because of the assumed threat to the rest of the world, NOT the threat he posed to his own people. If we really cared about those Shia buried in those mass graves then we wouldn't have ignored them after the post-1991 uprising. After all, SOMETHING led those people to assume that they could depend on American help. No - I didn't see anyone crying about the graves then - so please spare me the altruistic sheep's clothing.

Some artillery shells proves NOTHING. Whoop-de-doo. Like I said - what was he going to use them for? World domination? Regional destabilization? Not bloody likely. Or maybe just to kill more of his own people - which we already know he was doing....with those exact same chemicals.

Eghad said:
When President Bush talked about WMDs he was refereing to strategic weapons that could reach the United States in less than an hour or nuclear weapons not tactical weapons. This is not the first time chemical artillery munitons have been found in Iraq.

So show me the WMDs........im still waiting
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Exactly. The LETTER of the law does not distinguish varying methods of delivery. However, we are all intelligent enough to understand that this is not what we've been "looking for" and this is not what Bush had in mind when he said "Iraq has WMD"....
It's a step in the right direction, but it ain't front-page news.

Mad Martigan said:
I thought you said you knew what qualified.
Conventional international definitions unerringly include nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Delivery is irrelevant.
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Didn't claim I was an expert. I do know that while method of delivery may not matter to the LETTER of the law, the degree of THREAT does matter when WE talk about finding our "holy grail" in Iraq. A tactical weapon isn't a threat unless an enemy can get it within range - which in this case would be at most 30km. Just doesn't wash - regardless of what they found in the warhead.

Mad Martigan said:
Which is why I wouldn't put it that way.
It is some small vindication and just accentuates a few points some people (for various reasons) don't want to accept. Did Saddam have WMDs? Yes. Is it just another example of his heap of resolution violations? Yes. Does it illustrate the fact that Blix and crew were as worthless as we thought? Yes.
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Po-tay-toe, Po-tah-toe.

If we're willing to call Blix worthless based on the fact that he didn't find what took the entire American military more than three years to find - then we also need to be prepared to admit that this may be all we find at all.

dev_null said:
It's kind of like obtaining a no-knock warrant on a suspected meth lab and finding an old bag of pot seeds and stems someone left in a drawer last year. Illegal? Yes. Smoking gun? Get real.
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I wish I'd have thought of that analogy. Good call.
Maybe it will count in the long run, but it's definitely not enough to stand on its own at this point.
 
Ok - after some more reading - I'm not finding ANYWHERE that someone has officially stated that all they found were ARTILLERY shells.
So the time we've spent debating that point may be moot...unless someone has read something different.

So here's my thoughts on the issue:

1. Since these were degraded munitions it does not prove that there was a WMD program post-1991. A technicality to be sure, but an important one.
2. If what was found was indeed NOT simply artillery shells but a SIGNIFICANT amount of chemical weapons, then I agree this is very much what we've been looking for.
3. If what was found was NOT significant amounts of chemical agent, then this is just similar to prospecting in the 1800's. Someone would find a small vein of gold, and they'd just keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper - all the while hoping to find something more substantial. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't.
4. This DOES prove that Saddam was lying when he said that all of his WMD materiel had been destroyed. However - what is that REALLY worth? I mean, we already know he lied about so many things, and what are we going to do? Try him for perjury?

So - I suppose that until I can find something that gives a better picture of the quantity of chemical agents found, I'm just going to stand silent for now.
 
Well, I saw this last evening and decided to withhold comment until today in case further public information was presented. That doesn't seem to be the case. I don't think I have much to add beyond 'color me unsatisfied' at the moment. The faxed document attached to the Fox news story is barely newsworthy and certainly not worth the political weight Rick Santorum attempted to attach to it. Only one new item of information was presented - the 500 munitions - with the remainder consisting of talking points about how they could be used. As already stated by others here, not quite a 'smoking gun' just yet.

Antipitas, I concur with you that the original source (DOD) of the documents raises a whole host of other questions and should be the target of queries into this matter. I will add, though, that Santorum is a partisan animal of the first order who is facing a tough re-election battle this year. While I don't want to think that the DOD declassifies important information about the current conflict just to support an incumbent Republican senator's campaign, the fact that the mouthpiece for this news happened to be Santorum does nothing to enhance the credibility or strength of the statement.

I agree with dev_null on this one: were this the 'missing link', the real data to justify the conflict once and for all in the eyes of the American public and the world, logic would dictate that the highest echelons of the administration would be proclaiming their 'slam dunk case' as loudly and triumphantly as possible to anybody and everybody within earshot, even if they only released the exact same information as was released to Santorum. Now, whatever information DOD may not have released yet, it strikes me as equally logical that if it proved the administration's case in an even more firm manner, but they chose not to release it due to security concerns or other reasons, the administration still would be trumpeting what little information they have released.
 
They do a lot of things in Congress, among which are whizzing on my freedoms, using the Bill of Rights as toilet paper, and spending my childrens' future tax payments several decades ahead of time, but thinking does not go on in those hallowed halls too often.
 
Antipitas,
I highly doubt that there's enough degraded mustard gas in those cannisters to kill 2,500 Americans, maim 10,000 and cause 300 Billion dollars worth of damage. Or tie up our military to the point where we're powerless to stop North Korea and Iran from stockpiling *real* WMDs.
But hey, why let facts spoil a good rant?
 
That little skirmish in Iraq is largely irrelevant to whether we can stop Korea from doing anything. Seems to me a well-placed cruise missile or two fired from a sub would take care of that "threatening" rocket in Korea.
 
What kind of standard for urgency and "clear and present danger" do you use when Dictator A's potential WMDs are a cause for immediate invasion, and Dictator B's admitted WMDs and his fully fueled intercontinental missile on its launchpad merit a shrug and a "meh, we can take that thing out with a sub-launched TLAM if needed"?
 
The only entities that LIE more than polititions...

Are GUNWRITERS!:mad: - OOPS! Threaddrift here...(perhaps because I'm underwhelmed by the whole thing:barf:
 
The problem as I see it...

Iran is on the road to nuclear ballistic missles, Korea is within spitting distance. Bush used those as an excuse for a preemptive attack on Iraq as the primary reason. Why is he not attacking Iran and Korea and destroying thier nuclear capability? That is the doctrine Bush established in his speech.

Next we heard that we must overthrow Saddam and establish freedom in an Arab Country. As far as I know the only middle east nation which has a secular democracy is Turkey. The rest of them are authoritarian regimes run by one or a few people. I wonder how many people the Saudi officials have tortured and denied rights to?

For every reason the present administration has given there are other places in the world that have the same problems and we have not lifted a finger to help. I feel that the American people have not been given the real reasons, just the flag waving type reasons. For some reason even before 9/11 some of the administration had it in for Iraq. While the fires were still burning at the Pentagon and the WTC folks in the administration wanted to launch an attack against Iraq. This is not some made up rumor. This has been verified by internal documents and people who were there and is public knowledge.

When you have folks like Cheney saying the Iraqis would be throwing rose petals at our soldiers feet its obvious that some folks who were rushing to go to war with Iraq were clueless.

However, against good advice war was committed to. Now we are committed to stay to see this thing through. Anything less than a democratic government standing up in Iraq and takin over sucessfully will be a failure for us and the war on terrorism.

This whole spiral was started due to the fact that Russia was a world power and was defeated in Afghanistan. The light came on for some of these freedom fighters. If they could defeat a superpower then any superpower could be defeated. We are the last western superpower in the world and square in the bullseye of Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorists. They havent messed with China that much but I have the feeling they are on the shopping list as the next place.

This is a war which modern technolgy can not win alone. Its going to take some sweat, inspiration, serious thinking, tears and blood to make a dent in. Will we win it fully? Iraq is just the first step in a war that will last for years. We will not win this war soley on the use of military force.

The picture that I get of this administration and Iraq is that of a little Dutch boy sticking his fingers in holes in the dike. Only the fingers being stuck in the dikes our the lives and health of our citizens in the military and other organizations over there.
 
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