Iraq: A Federal Judge's Point of View

[Gadfly]

Well, you can not assume rational thought for Saddam.  It appears to me, that he(we, the world), did indeed destroy most, if not all of his weapons. (Note that without his co-operation there is only one way to ascertain this fact, and that is what the U.S. has done).

In light of his stance towards the inspections, this can mean only one of 2 things.  He either bluffed about maintaining his weapons to maintain his stature in the Arab world, or he did it to maintain the threat towards his neighbors.  Either way, as the result shows, it was an irrational and highly stupid act.

As for a direct link to a specific terrorist act, I do not think that it is possible to indisputably prove such a link, and do not think it is required.  At least by American Law, the evidence is solid enough to convict him personally, and his regime in general, for supporting terrorism.

Also, again, do not forget the attempted attack on the elder Bush.  The evidence was strong enough for the previous administration to take retaliatory steps against him, so it can not be ignored.

[k2cok]

There is nothing in any of those links about the Iraq and al-Queda alliance. Your side stepping the question again.

It's obvious saddam was a no good POS, I don't think anyone here is disputing that, but let's get back to which Bush statements were lies, was it-the SOTU address or yesterday?

Erlkonig, Bush sold the Iraq war on the basis of WMD and the al-Queda connection.

The al-Queda connection was a lie, the African uranium statements were known to be lies-yet Bush didn't hesitate to repeat them in the SOTU speech.

Bush had the benefit of the doubt on WMD but that's fading fast, and it doesn't help his case much when no weapons are being found and he continues to lie about hydrogen generators being mobile bio-weapon labs .

At this point he has about as much credibility as a used car saleman.

[Gadfly]

K2ock, I have gone through the trouble of posting links and quotes to back up my statements.  If you would do the same, we could continue the debate.

[Krusher]

Originally posted by GScholz
What specific terrorist attacks did the former government of Iraq commit, organize or aid?

they paid 25,000 to any Palistinean who died attacking Jews.

Thats sounds like aid to me.

[straffo]

Originally posted by Krusher
they paid 25,000 to any Palistinean who died attacking Jews.

Thats sounds like aid to me.

wrong answer : it's not specific

[muckmaw]

There's no question a good portion of the justification for war was sold and hyped by the Bush administration.

I think most wars are propagandized, as the American public normally prefers a course of isolationism.

9/11 changed all that. We were looking for a fight, and one was manufactured for us.

I don't think Bush Lied about WMD's but he surely does have egg on his face on that particular aspect now. I highly doubt the WMDs will ever be found and very likely were destroyed. I think he believed in his heart, and was told by the intelligence agencies that there were in fat WMDs there. Why else would he crucify himself? So instead of being a liar, he's a dupe. Not much better, but....

I guess Saddam actually believed the UN Inspectors were spies. Why else would he have kept them out if he really had nothing to hide?

In the defense of Bush and Co. it was recently stated by members of the former Iraqi government, that Saddam perpetrated the  belief that he had WMD's to keep the US at bay. Perhaps his little facade worked too well.

Though I agree that the war was sold to us, I still believe strongly that the end result is worth the effort. Iraq is still a necessary battleground against terrorism.

Unfortunatley, it's not nearly as festering with terrorists as Saudi Arabia, but we all know that country is off the list of potential targets.

[Charon]

Neville Chamberlain!

The WMD are hidden in the Maginot Line


Some of us never believed 9/11 or WMD were the main reasons for the war, just the justification for proceeding with a risky, McNamara-esque vision by the PNAC on how we could remake the middle east through force and on ours and Israel's terms. NEOCONS like Wolfowitz, Perle and Rumsfield convinced the president of a grand vision that was too hard to explain to the people on its own merits, or lack there of apparently. They have been pushing for this for over a decade -- there is a lot of documentation on this and they aren't shy about addressing it directly -- and after 9/11 they saw the opportunity to make it happen.

They were helped by a Washington Press Corp, who -- with a few notable exceptions like Helen Thomas who was dropped from the president's final pre-war press conference because she asked hard questions -- didn't want to risk their careers (access to officials/embeds/public opinion) by being too controversial. They were just like the cowardly Democratic politicians who only now think it was a bad idea.

FWIW I didn't like this one bit (they made an awful lot of assumptions that didn't seem all that solid) but felt it was technically justified by the WMD issue. Most of us thought they were there, I'm fairly sure even Bush though they were there. But, I don't think it was an important enough reason to the people setting the policy to make absolutely sure they were. Anyway, It's really all about Saudi Arabia.

William Kristol

Testimony Before
The House Committee on International Relations
Subcommittee on Middle East and South Asia

May 22, 2002

Excerpts from: http://www.newamericancentury.org/saudi-052302.htm

Since the end of World War II, the United States has regarded the al-Saud regime as a friend, or an ally, or at least a partner for stability in the Middle East. After September 11, it is time to call this assumption into question. It is time for the United States to rethink its relationship with Riyadh. For we are now at war -- at war with terror and its sponsor, radical Islam. And in this war, the Saudi regime is more part of the problem than part of the solution...

The case for reevaluating our strategic partnership with the current Saudi regime is a strong one. Begin with the simple fact that 15 of the 19 participants in the September 11 attacks were Saudi nationals. That’s something the Saudis themselves could not initially admit. A large proportion -- perhaps as high as 80 percent, according to some reports -- of the “detainees” taken from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay are Saudis. And although Osama bin Laden has made much of his antipathy to the Saudi regime, his true relationship with the royal family is certainly more complex and questionable. The Saudis refused, despite the urgings of the Clinton Administration, to take him into custody in 1996 when Sudan offered to deliver him...

But even more important than funding terrorist acts has been the Saudi regime’s general and aggressive export of Wahhabi fundamentalism. “Saudi Arabia,” writes Michael Vlahos of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has “sought to make Islam a sort of wholly-owned subsidiary of the Saud family.” Wahhabi teachings, religious schools and Saudi oil money have encouraged young Muslims in countries around the world to a jihad-like incitement against non-Muslims. The combination of Wahhabi ideology and Saudi money has contributed more to the radicalization and anti-Americanization of large parts of the Islamic world than any other single factor...

At the same time, it is clear that we cannot base our strategy for the region on the hope that the Saudis will moderate their behavior to suit our interests. To the Saudis we have been, at best, allies of convenience, shielding them from other would-be regional hegemons with greater conventional military strength, larger populations and more diverse economies. The Saudi desire to create a caliphate of money and religious extremism depends upon an unwitting American partner.

So in addition to hoping for and encouraging change from within Saudi Arabia, we should develop strategic alternatives to reliance on Riyadh. In the military sphere, we have already begun to hedge, with agreements and deployments to other Gulf emirates. Although still the strongest influence on oil prices, other source -- in Russia, the Caspian Basin, Mexico and elsewhere -- can be developed and brought to market at a reasonable cost. The attacks of September 11 remind us that it is not just what we pay at the pump but what we pay in lives, security and international political stability that comprise the true price of Saudi oil...

In particular, removing the regime of Saddam Hussein and helping construct a decent Iraqi society and economy would be a tremendous step toward reducing Saudi leverage. Bringing Iraqi oil fully into world markets would improve energy economics. From a military and strategic perspective, Iraq is more important than Saudi Arabia. And building a representative government in Baghdad would demonstrate that democracy can work in the Arab world. This, too, would be a useful challenge to the current Saudi regime...

Additional:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/middleeast-20010827.htm
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqsep1898.htm

Charon

[Charon]

Hackworth is also calling it like it is:

Time for Straight Talk

By David H. Hackworth

Recent polls reveal that 70 percent of Americans honestly believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 – a powerful testimony to Karl Rove and the neoconservative propaganda machine.

Connecting the dots where there aren’t any in order to pin the rap on Saddam is about as bent as ignoring Saudi Arabia’s very real involvement in 9/11. But that linkage just might inconvenience a bunch of crooked oil barons doing “bidnezz” with their porker pals in Washington.

The cold facts are that the destruction of the twin towers was carefully planned by the al-Qaeda gang led by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi fundamentalist Muslim who would probably sooner form some sort of alliance with the state of Israel than join forces with Saddam, whom he’s always considered as corrupt an infidel as the rest of us. Count on it – no fingerprints from former top Iraqi leadership will ever be found tying Baghdad to 9/11.

Several years before that sad, calamitous September day, my wife and I moved from New York City to Connecticut. As a contributing editor for Newsweek who’s spent a fair amount of my life studying terrorism and insurgency, I could see a tsunami-grade terrorist attack coming as clearly as the cityscapes of the towers we used to seek out during early morning constitutionals. That is, until my fears finally convinced my wife that we should move to safer ground.            

As I pumped grunt sources, read thousands of reports and slowly put the terrible puzzle together, all the arrows pointed toward our being whacked – just as the fall of Saigon seemed inevitable to me after comparing that bloody reality to the Nixon/Kissinger spin on how well the phony “peace with honor” Vietnamization program was going.

And as in Vietnam in 1971, I began sounding the alarm about this imminent new terrorist threat during well-attended speeches across America, as a talking head on hundreds of TV and radio shows and in this column. I even did a major piece for Maxim’s August 2000 issue called “World War III: Terrorism,” which outlined five possible scenarios Osama’s boys might use in five U.S. cities – including the Big Apple.

The general underwhelming reaction was: “Well, Hackworth's finally lost it, and he should fade away.”

Instead, I held my position and kept putting out the word while Eilhys and I built our house of bricks at a careful distance from what's now known as Ground Zero.

On the two-year anniversary of 9/11, both the hardliners within the administration and the chicken hawks on the airwaves are stubbornly continuing to blame the strikes on Saddam, painting his tyrannical regime as a major player in the Islamic fundamentalist jihad to maintain support for our gigantic misadventure in Iraq. It was the same sort of scare tactics the manipulators used during the Vietnam War when they kept asserting that a defeat there would be the key domino falling and we’d soon be defending the beaches of the West Coast from invading commies.

Once again, most Americans – including a lot of red-faced lawmakers – have fallen for the old Hitler trick: Tell a lie often enough and the people will believe it.

The losers are our soldiers still stuck in the sand, the scores of fallen warriors who were quietly buried from “sea to shining sea,” the hundreds of maimed who are maxing out our military hospitals, and the American taxpayers who’ll be laying out big bucks for a war against terrorism that has struck the wrong target.          

And we’re talking another big win for Osama, who’s out there somewhere sucking the sweet Pakistani mountain air as he plots yet more genocide against an America whose homeland defenses – despite the billions of dollars blown – are perhaps only marginally better than pre-9/11.
         
The Bush administration has a responsibility to tell the American people the truth, not feed us more self-serving lies – now more than ever, since so many good folks are too busy looking for jobs to separate the cow mounds from the grass.

And the buck doesn’t stop there: We the people need to understand that if we aren’t vigilant and insistent on the truth, then we are one with the liars who got us into this mess in the first place.

[muckmaw]

Something interesting I found while reading UN Resolution 687 from the 1991 Cease Fire agreement:

"Deploring threats made by Iraq during the recent conflict to make use of terrorism against targets outside Iraq and the taking of hostages by Iraq."

Have a look and make your own decision. It's in the first  section.