Click the links in the following URL for more details: coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
Is this link not working or is it just me?
It’s you. 
Click again and read carefully … 
The following is excerpted from:
[quote=“Article”]The Iraqis also tended to admit things in reverse. In other words, it was only at the height of the Blix moment in 2003 that they conceded how near they had been to a nuclear weapon in 1990, when almost nobody believed they had such a capacity. And we know how many chemical and biological weapons they possessed at one time because they reluctantly handed over long lists stating what they were.
Thus if nothing has been found so far, and if literally nothing (except the mobile units predicted and described by one defector) is found from now on, it will mean that the operation was a success. The stuff must have been destroyed, or neutralized, or work on it must have been abandoned during the long grace period that was provided by the U.N. debates. One senior U.N. inspector adds a caveat to that, which is worth stressing. The intention of the regime to acquire weapons at some point, or to reacquire them, should not be doubted. There are many blueprints and many brains and many computer discs full of know-how. These would be nearly if not actually impossible to discover, and they will now not be reassembled by a Baathist government. Thus if you take my line of the “long short war,” and a timeline of 1990 to 2003, Saddam Hussein went from being a threshold nuclear potentate with the capacity to invade Kuwait to an ex-potentate unable even to deploy his Republican Guard. This was the outcome of a series of measures, from sanctions to bombing, designed to create the conditions for regime change or to make regime change (desirable for numberless other reasons) possible. The anti-war movement opposed even the sanctions at first and the military part of the operation at all times. But Iraq is now disarmed, and who will argue that it was not the believable threat of intervention that brought this about?
Perhaps half-aware that this is true, anti-war Democrats and some others are now saying that the world has nonetheless been made more dangerous because of the threat of additional terrorism. Some stuff may have gone missing, and the fanatics may have been encouraged. Well, they can’t have this both ways, either. If there was stuff to go missing, then it was there all along, wasn’t it? And it wasn’t being kept for recreational use. The incompetence of the U.S. protective and investigative teams, in this and in some other areas (like the elementary delivery of supplies and repairs) doesn’t alter that fact. As to the terrorists who (remember?) had “no connection” to Saddam Hussein, they seem moved nonetheless to take revenge for his fall. Can that possibly mean they feel they have lost a friend?[/quote]
As the article above says, “nothing has been found so far”.
All the rest is hedging, would, should etc.
[quote=“Soddom”]As the article above says, “nothing has been found so far”.
All the rest is hedging, would, should etc.[/quote]
No, the article says "IF nothing has been found… the operation will have been a success.
I agree. The goal of UN inspectors was to VERIFY the destruction or otherwise account for WMD in Iraq. Saddam made that an impossible goal for the UN inspectors. If the US can now verify that no WMD exist in Iraq… goal accomplished.
[quote=“tigerman”][quote=“Soddom”]As the article above says, “nothing has been found so far”.
All the rest is hedging, would, should etc.[/quote]
No, the article says "IF nothing has been found… the operation will have been a success.
I agree. The goal of UN inspectors was to VERIFY the destruction or otherwise account for WMD in Iraq. Saddam made that an impossible goal for the UN inspectors. If the US can now verify that no WMD exist in Iraq… goal accomplished.[/quote]
If ? It’s still an imaginary (conditional) expression. Hedging.
And “If the US can now verify that no WMD exist in Iraq… goal accomplished” then there never were any weapons. And if they do find them, maybe the US planted them since they have done their utmost to keep the UN out.
The point is this kind of speculative article gets us nowhere.
[quote=“tigerman”][quote=“Soddom”]As the article above says, “nothing has been found so far”.
All the rest is hedging, would, should etc.[/quote]
No, the article says "IF nothing has been found… the operation will have been a success.
I agree. The goal of UN inspectors was to VERIFY the destruction or otherwise account for WMD in Iraq. Saddam made that an impossible goal for the UN inspectors. If the US can now verify that no WMD exist in Iraq… goal accomplished.[/quote]
Oh my god Tigerman, you are the king of BS. Now I have heard everything!
Tigerman once threw a hotdog at me.
I ransacked his house like a vigilante, blew up his kitchen suspecting that he had more wieners to use on me and my allies. I claimed victory in the name of peace.
But shit what did I find? None. Oh well mission accomplished: He has none that’s all I wanted to make sure of.
Don’t tell anyone that not only do I have refrigerators loaded with processed meat, I have tankards full of beer, and jars of pickles.
[quote=“Alleycat”]Tigerman once threw a hotdog at me.
I ransacked his house like a vigilante, blew up his kitchen suspecting that he had more wieners to use on me and my allies.[/quote]
Wieners of mass destruction. In England we call them “bangers.”
You guys did click and read the link I posted before starting the old arguments again?
Just wondering …
Yes of course and it is pleasing indeed to see that Juba does after all have a sense of humor.
“What do you mean he’s guilty if he did it and he’s guilty if he didn’t do it?” Alice asked crossly, her face darkening into a deep frown.
“He’s been charged with both crimes,” answered the Mad Hatter haughtily.
“Well, how can both not doing something and doing it be a crime at the same time?” asked Alice again, deeply vexed.
“It’s right here in the indictment,” said the White Rabbit, handing Alice a piece of paper, “perfectly legal.”
Alice took one look at the paper and nearly threw it back at the White Rabbit, causing him to duck.
“Why there’s nothing at all on this piece of paper. It’s blank!” she cried.
With that the White Rabbit took up the piece of paper in his teeth and delivered it with a formal flourish to the King as if he were performing a normal court function. The King began scribbling furiously on the paper as Alice watched in disbelief.
“You can’t write up charges here in the middle of proceedings – after a trial has already started!”
The King looked at Alice a long moment over the tops of his glasses, fixing his gaze on her with long-sufferance and gravity before he chose to speak.
“We most certainly can,” he answered quietly, “so long as we don’t change anything. That would be perfectly illegal.”
Although I found the website from the first post to be pretty funny, the rest of this thread is just tragic.
Folks, they HAVE found evidence of an ongoing weapons program in Iraq. Even the New York Times, leftist rag that it is, doesn’t dispute that any more. (And the byline on the story wasn’t Jayson Blair, before anyone asks.)
What do you think those mobile production labs are? Homebrewing setups so that Saddam could brew up some pilsner while he’s camping?
The labs had equipment in them which was labeled as having been made in 2002 and 2003. Right up to the kickoff of hostilities, Saddam was continuing to manufacture WMD infrastructure. (Source: New York Times again.)
In case you’re too braindead to realize it, all it takes to “prime the pump” is a little test tube full of bacterial culture. Throw that into some growth media (“germ food”, as the NYT reporter has dumbed it down), keep the temperature in the right range, and a few days later you have several gallons of anthrax solution. It’s almost exactly like homebrewing.
Same thing goes for botulism, although you then have to refine out the botulinum toxin.
Besides which, the worse problem was the ongoing research. I presume you’ve heard the old canard about “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime”? The U.N. gave the bastard twelve years to do more R&D on biological and chemical weapons. And, as those mobile labs show, he used that time productively.
Let’s engage in a little basic math here. The unsubstantiated claim was that Saddam Hussein had a couple of hundred thousand liters of anthrax spores, right? So you people are bitching because the U.S. hasn’t found a cube six meters on a side that’s filled with anthrax. (For the metric-challenged, call it twenty feet on a side.) That volume is about the size of my basement.
And, frankly, even if it turns out that the bastard was lily-pure as far as WMDs go, he was still a murderous thug who slaughtered more innocent Iraqis per day than the U.S. did at the height of our war. Have you been studiously ignoring the mass graves that have been dug up? You know, the ones filled with people who were shot in the back of the head, or buried alive? There’ve been news photos of these; Saddam’s ministries left documents in their headquarters listing some of the victims’ names and “crimes”. Then there are all the permanently-crippled victims of torture who are hobbling (or not even able to do that much) around, people with their tongues cut out, limbs chopped off or mangled. There was an Indian businessman let out of prison after twelve years of being held in a lightless cell; his “crime” was to tell an Iraqi guard that if Saddam didn’t pull out of Kuwait, the world would force him out – this was at the end of 1990, just before the Gulf War. (He was right, or didn’t you notice? Didn’t matter; they still kept him locked up for daring to contradict the Baath Party line.)
And let’s not forget Saddam’s chemical-weapons attacks against the Kurds. He killed over 5000 people in just one day in one of his attacks. He demonstrated quite adequately at that time that he had chemical weapons and was happy to use them.
In short, too bad your pet dictator got deposed. No matter what you want to believe on WMDs, he obviously deserved it. And I hope Kim Jong-Il will be next (and soon).
Relevant links:
New York Times article discussing the mobile labs:
nytimes.com/2003/05/21/inter … wanted=all
KRG on Saddam Hussein’s chemical-weapons use against the Kurds:
krg.org/reference/hrw-anfal/anfal2.asp