Quote:
Originally posted by PornoDoggy@Aug 25 2003, 08:56 PM
Look ... if Saddam had an active WMD program immediately prior to this war ... even if he had an active WMD program three YEARS before this war ... the evidence would be all over Iraq, not in mystery trailers in Lebanon or floating at sea in some mystery ship.
|
this is why i say that the whole thing was a little dissapointing. it's fine to say that we knew about all the descrepencies, deception and lies for the 12 years and that there were large amounts of weapons unnacounted for - which was entirely true.
what is dissapointing to me is that there was such confidence in what was there and what would be found. large teams were assembled that fanned out accross the country, simple suspected finds (if everyone remembers the pesticides and other crap) were HUGE media hits though they ended up being false. the list can go on and on.
as PD says... you can't just wake up one morning and hide all traces of evidence of active weapons production on a whim. it simply can't be done. that means that there was a lot of bad information, a lot of willingness to act on bad information, a lot of willingness to listed to exiles with bad information and there was just a lot of bad intelligence to begin with.
Colin Powell was pretty specific at the UN about what they "knew" to be there right? where is all that stuff? they found a couple semi trailers which were sterilized and buried in the desert..... and? a fist full of parts to some nuclear related thing burried in a guys backyard. That does not seem like an eminent threat to me.
if the cry for war would have been simply "Fuck these guys, i am sick of their shit" - i would have readily accepted that under the circumstances. But the US Administration went through a great deal of trouble to prove what Iraq had, what they were hiding, what they were pursuing and what a threat they were and that was the basis for telling the world "its going to be a campaign of Shock and Awe" - so in retrospect, i think it was a pretty big mistake to do without the support of the international community considering that it is now something we can't walk away from and the UN is probably not going to get deeply involved in (security aspects) and they clearly are not happy about the US being there.
Last edited by JR at Aug 25 2003, 10:47 PM