Originally posted by Jackal1
The WMD thingy has been run completely in the ground. It nears the point of hilarity to me every time this is brought up. The WMDs were and probably some still are. Like was stated they have been used by this country before.
You think the chemical warhead containers were for the purpose of delivering candy, pinata style to the kids? Geez.
What about the "Big Gun" laucher that was disasembled? It wasn`t for a huge fireworks display as a present for surrounding countries.[/SIZE]
It makes me laugh to hear the
entire justification for a war with an initial cost of some $180bn, and more than 1000 American lives lost, reclassified as the "WMD thingy".
Chemical warhead containers? You could also have mentioned the centrifuges he wanted for producing weapons grade plutonium. You could have mentioned the nerve gases such as sarin and tabun, which are easy to make and are composed of several chemicals each of which is harmless in isolation, and how Saddam tried to buy these harmless chemicals from different sources. Yes, I know about the Iraqi supergun, part of which came from Britain. These are all reasons why I would have preferred W's dad to have finished the job in 1991. Had the job been finished then, I think there would have been a much greater chance of finding WMD. But... 12 years went by, during which time the issue was arguably neglected by Clinton. IIRC, W declared his intent to invade Iraq on 12th September 2001. But hostilities did not begin till early 2003, partly owing to the UN and prevarication. Who knows what happened to Saddam's arsenal in that time?
Sorry if it sounds like a jab, but it simply isn't good enough to dismiss the
entire justification for going to war as an irrelevance, or as a "thingy" that has run aground, only then to try to
invent other reasons for going to war, after the fact. The whole debacle has played into the anti-war crusaders' hands, so that next time a crisis or threat to our security arises, mobilisation of our military forces to address that threat is a notion that is going to be much more difficult to sell to the public. If such a crisis were to arise in an election campaign year, well, I'll leave you to figure it out.
Of course Iraq is better off without Saddam, with all that entails. But toppling Saddam's regime, and establishing democracy/elections in Iraq - good though this has been - was
NOT the official justification for going to war in the first place.
