Glory Days wrote:
you cant deny he didnt have them at one point, he actually used them. where did they go? Iran, Hamas, Syria, thousands of feet deep under the open desert? the point is, we didnt know. we couldnt take his word for it and its not like the inspectors looked anywhere but military facilities probably. and if we didnt think he had them at the time of the invasion, why did our forces spend most of the time in MOPP gear on the march up to baghdad? we had already invaded, why continue the show and hindering our forces if it was just all lies anyway?

Yeah, he did have them at one point. But, the Gulf War and aftermath revealed to the world the nature of the program. What happened then was UN inspectors, UNSCOM, http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/General/basicfacts.html
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/missile/unscom.htm
effectively destroyed all of Iraq's stockpiles and then carried out inspections to ensure Iraq did not build up its program.

Interviews with Iraqi scientists afterward shows that UNSCOM severely limited their capabilities. Iraq was crippled and never recovered. There was a Foreign Policy article a few years ago that highlighted the fact that the Iraqi scientists, for fear for their life's, never told Saddam they simply did not have the capability to produce weapons.

So, where did they go, they were destroyed in 1991, 1992.

So when the UN finally got back in there before the war, did they go because we wanted them to or because they had their own suspicions?

Because we wanted them. We led the charge to establish UNSCOM.

Glory Days wrote:

dwccrew wrote:

Glory Days wrote:
pretty self explanatory...and hell, slick willy didnt even have an office of special plans to come up with those lies! and if you give me 4 years to hide something in a country like Iraq, no one will find it.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/607rkunu.asp

Wait, you don't really believe (now at this point in time after all we know) that there was ever WMD's in Iraq at the time of invasion, do you?

Give me 7 years to find WMD in a country like Iraq and you'll find them. We supposedly had satellite images of these "WMD's" yet we now can't find them? Something doesn't add up.

you cant deny he didnt have them at one point, he actually used them. where did they go? Iran, Hamas, Syria, thousands of feet deep under the open desert? the point is, we didnt know. we couldnt take his word for it and its not like the inspectors looked anywhere but military facilities probably. and if we didnt think he had them at the time of the invasion, why did our forces spend most of the time in MOPP gear on the march up to baghdad? we had already invaded, why continue the show and hindering our forces if it was just all lies anyway?

See below

ptown_trojans_1 wrote:

Glory Days wrote:
you cant deny he didnt have them at one point, he actually used them. where did they go? Iran, Hamas, Syria, thousands of feet deep under the open desert? the point is, we didnt know. we couldnt take his word for it and its not like the inspectors looked anywhere but military facilities probably. and if we didnt think he had them at the time of the invasion, why did our forces spend most of the time in MOPP gear on the march up to baghdad? we had already invaded, why continue the show and hindering our forces if it was just all lies anyway?

Yeah, he did have them at one point. But, the Gulf War and aftermath revealed to the world the nature of the program. What happened then was UN inspectors, UNSCOM, http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/General/basicfacts.html
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/missile/unscom.htm
effectively destroyed all of Iraq's stockpiles and then carried out inspections to ensure Iraq did not build up its program.

Interviews with Iraqi scientists afterward shows that UNSCOM severely limited their capabilities. Iraq was crippled and never recovered. There was a Foreign Policy article a few years ago that highlighted the fact that the Iraqi scientists, for fear for their life's, never told Saddam they simply did not have the capability to produce weapons.

So, where did they go, they were destroyed in 1991, 1992.

Ptown nailed it.

Hans Blix, the man in charge of it all, wanted more time to look.

ptown_trojans_1 wrote:

Glory Days wrote:
you cant deny he didnt have them at one point, he actually used them. where did they go? Iran, Hamas, Syria, thousands of feet deep under the open desert? the point is, we didnt know. we couldnt take his word for it and its not like the inspectors looked anywhere but military facilities probably. and if we didnt think he had them at the time of the invasion, why did our forces spend most of the time in MOPP gear on the march up to baghdad? we had already invaded, why continue the show and hindering our forces if it was just all lies anyway?

Yeah, he did have them at one point. But, the Gulf War and aftermath revealed to the world the nature of the program. What happened then was UN inspectors, UNSCOM, http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/General/basicfacts.html
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/missile/unscom.htm
effectively destroyed all of Iraq's stockpiles and then carried out inspections to ensure Iraq did not build up its program.

Interviews with Iraqi scientists afterward shows that UNSCOM severely limited their capabilities. Iraq was crippled and never recovered. There was a Foreign Policy article a few years ago that highlighted the fact that the Iraqi scientists, for fear for their life's, never told Saddam they simply did not have the capability to produce weapons.

So, where did they go, they were destroyed in 1991, 1992.

Exactly PTowne. Now it is true, that since UNSCOM was booted out in 98, the inspectors didn't know what exactly was happening for that period of time. However, both Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei re-entered Iraq, unfettered. in Dec of 02...a full 3 months prior to the massacre of Iraq.

They visited 90% to 95% of all the sites the US claimed WMD locationa. All negative. As was reported internationally by the on the ground inspectors. Just more proof that the past administration lied to the Ameriican public on many fronts.

It's one thing to lie to Congress and the American people...but it's another thing when you lie to the new enlisttees...who never thought the administration would do such a thing when their lives were at stake.

ptown_trojans_1 wrote: Add the references.

Which ones? Cheney or Bush 41? Or both?

PTowne...youtube is pretty good....

"Quagmire Dick" must have had an epiphany of sorts.

This is Dick in 94....explaining all the reasons why not to take down Hussein.

From George Herbert Walker Bush...On Why We should not remove Saddam.....


We were disappointed that Saddam's defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. ................(directly from Bush's speech...word for word)......."We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome."

http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/169/36409.html

Acrually...from the same link...the paragraph above quotes Bush 41's speech given in 1998.

Sorry for the confusion here....

Excerpt from "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam" by George Bush [Sr.] and Brent Scowcroft, Time (2 March 1998): While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome. I've been told that the same passage appears on page 489 of Bush and Scowcroft's book, A World Transformed (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).