News0 min ago
Weapons of Missingness
'US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said Iraq may have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the US went to war against Saddam Hussein in March.'
Wot? Invalidating your excuse for the war in the first place? Shurely not? Trouble is, they'll claim,' Ah, but we thought it *was* genuine when we went to war, so we're in the clear!' Bunch o'liaring king cnuts (ang)!
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.The above quote forms the opening words to Security Council Resolution 1441, which the USA and Britain used as grounds for attacking Iraq. That resolution was signed-up-to by all fifteen members of the Council, including France and Russia. It is perfectly clear, therefore, that it was not just the coalition countries that believed or had evidence that these weapons existed. Everybody there did!
How Putin then had the effrontery to try making fun of Blair by asking "What weapons?" is an abiding mystery. Obviously, the very weapons mentioned in 1441 that he instructed his Ambassador to the United Nations to add his signature to! That's what weapons.
Now we've got the ranting press clamouring about what justification there was for invading Iraq. To my mind a mass grave - never mind many such graves - is a weapon of mass destruction. Who cares if there are no Scuds or anthrax? We've saved multitudes from Saddam's terrorism...end of story.
If you want to read Resolution 1441, you'll find the text by clicking http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/15016.htm
Your point about mass graves is absolutely evidence that Saddam was a monster, but 1) there's plenty worse who haven't been invaded and 2) that wasn't the reason given for going to war (certainly not initially and until the Weapons of Mass Distruction argument was loudly decried by such a large portion of the electorate).
I feel you're missing my point somewhat. The war was presented to the great unwashed as a duty to rid a madman of weapons and with a provable link to Al Queada. The US claimed to have proof of this. The UK said they believed it, and would proove it. Many of us thought it was a load of horsecack then and are demanding the proof.
I don't want my country to have committed a crime - surely that is a good and patriotic opinion to hold. I realise they'll never be held accountable in law, but I think it's absolutely right to ask for the proof.
Why is it so hard to believe that all 15 members of the Security Council genuinely believed what they said they believed? And, if they believed it, surely they had to act decisively. So the belief may have been wrong...so what?
'Large portions of the electorate' tend to decry things solely at the urging of the tabloids. Most recently, for example, more than eight out of ten people surveyed had no idea what the European Constitution fuss was all about, yet they are the very "people whose voice must be heard", according to the ranting press and a certain political party! Every prognostication of the anti-war lobby proved to be false, so now all they have to cling to is the 'missing weapons' concept. Even if Bush and Blair deliberately lied pre-war, at least they can rest content that they achieved marvels for freedom and the absence of terror. Their opponents are perfectly free to say that these were not got "in their names". There was no crime, Waldo, so just 'Rejoice!'
In they lied - and I'm sorry, but nothing you've said undermines my contention that the war was illegal - then the anti-war movement was entirely justified. You say that the anti-war lobby is clinging to the missing weapons, I say er... they were the reason given for going to war. I also say the pro-war lobby keep saying, 'Ah, be we stopped Saddam, and he was a bad naughty man', but everyone knew he was a genocidal maniac right back in the 80's. There was NO urgent need to stop hm in 2003 - scrotum though he definitely is, he'd been low profile since the first Gulf War. Governments invading the sovrienty of other nations without credible reasons (and if they were so credible, how come so many people across the world stood up and said, 'Come off it, that's palpable nonsense'? It certainly is a crime and if all we can do is stand in a street with a banner, then that is what should be done. I shall also be doing my part to vote Blair out of office come the next general election.
Resolution 1441 - agreed-to by all 15 members of the Security Council - stated categorically last November that the weapons existed. But it wasn't just 1441 that set things off, it was a trail of earlier resolutions, spanning more than a decade, that persistently claimed Saddam had such weapons. Clearly, then, John Major and Bill Clinton must have had their UN ambassadors sign up to the effect that they, too, believed they existed. Another pair of lying criminals, perhaps? Even the 'honourable' Robin Cook's speeches throughout the late nineties indicate that he firmly believed it also.
Consider Saddam's constant shenanigans with the UN arms inspectors and his eventual effective 'deportation' of them. Nor could he offer any evidence that the WMD had - as he claimed - already been destroyed. If none are ever found, couldn't that be the explanation? What you have to ask yourself, however, is: 'Would you have believed him?
In other words, just about everybody in the known world believed in these WMD! I certainly believed in them...didn't you? Now, though, we're being asked to believe that Blair and Bush, in a two-man conspiracy, just cooked the idea up a few months ago. It's rubbish, pure and simple, and politically-inspired rubbish at that.
Saddam Hussein has been a monster virtually since the moment the CIA created him as a hitman to kill Yasser Arafat and then covered their eyes as he staged a bloody coup in Iraq. Yes, he is genocidal and yes there are mass graves, and the man is right up with the biggest f*ckwits in history.
BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THE WAR WAS ABOUT!
If 'the powers that be' were concerned with Saddam's human rights breaches, they would have been in Iraq 20 years earlier. If they generally cared about human rights abuses, they'd be in *loads* of countries but a basic look at US foriegn policy over the past 50 years perfectly demonstrates that the US overlooks massive human rights abuses (Chile, anyone? Indeed, Chile of course is a country where the democratically elected president was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup and replaced with one of the biggest mass murderers of the last century - Pinochet) as long as the state behaves in accordance with US wishes. Sorry, but they don't give a damn.
In the case of Iraq, the US was looking stupid and inneffectual having failed to find Bin Laden, and needed a victory over someone in order to keep face.
I don't object to a tyrant being deposed at all, I object to the imperialism of it, and I object to being treated like a idiot and being lied to. They told us the war was about WMD people went and protested, because the arguements and evidence they presented did not add up. They're now saying, 'Oh, there may not have been any WMD in there anyway, or they may have destroyed them.'
Quizzy would have you believe that it's naive to believe Bush and Blair could concoct such a lie, but frankly if you can convince people you won a presidency campaign despite cheating and not getting the most votes, I don't think you can be trusted at all.
Of course, the interesting thing now is Rumsf*ck's statement last week "Iran should be on notice; efforts to try to remake Iraq in Iran's image will be aggressively put down." Whereas efforts to make Iraq in the USA's image is apparently fine... Interesting notions of nation sovreignty there Mr R.
Before leaving the room, the student is shown that the table, despite its shape and his reasonable explanation for his answer, does in fact have only three legs.
This, it seems to me, beautifully sums up the 'Are there/aren't there/were there/weren't there WMD in Iraq' question. Tony Blair made a perfectly reasonable pre-war case, on all the grounds I listed in my earlier responses here, that - given what any rational being could deduce - there were WMD and everybody believed that, not just him.
If the WMD do prove non-existent, that doesn't make him a "liar" any more than the absent table-leg makes the student a "liar"...just wrong, which is not at all the same thing. The whole duping/lying hoo-hah is still utter rubbish. (For me...end of story.)
"Oil target=_blank>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,970331
,00.html
"Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the US-led war. The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair's position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is "swimming" in oil."
"The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt."
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