An A for effort.....
 

No.

(1) The Clinton thing was more or less an aside. I've now clarified it, and put it to you that when Clinton left office, Iraq had no WMD programs and no WMD that we know of, and so containment was working. If you want to argue about that, go nuts. But that argument doesn't depend on Ricks. You'll have to explain that David Kay is all wet, and that magical fairies made all the evidence disappear and flew all the WMD to Syria.

(2) I offered Ricks as a cite for the proposition that surviving Iraqi WMD programs were effectively done in by Operation Desert Fox. This appears to be the consensus view of the United States government, and in particular of the military and the CIA. You dispute this, apparently without any evidence but rather on the proposition that we don't have perfect information and Ricks hasn't done any original reporting.

eta: And because you don't care for him.

No?

cite, please
 

An A for effort.....
 

1) I stated what we were arguing about. You have started new subjects that have been beaten to death before. We don't know if Iraq had WMDs when Bush entered office. We know the Clinton administration thought Saddam had them when they left office. If Ricks claims he knows how effective Operation Desert Fox was, or what happened to the WMDs, he is being disengenuous. But we have beaten that to death.

2) As far as Operation Desert Fox and David Kay I already gave you a quote from David Kay. On January 23, 2004, David Kay resigned stating that Iraq did not have WMD and that "I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them." As far as I know David Kay never said that Operation Desert Fox eliminated a lot of them or that he said that the WMDs were gone when Bush II entered office. He just said they were gone when our soldiers got there. In fact, one time in an interview with National Public Radio, he said Iraq had been working on weaponizing ricin up until Operation Iraqi Freedom. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion...0209/9john.htm

Other comments by Kay: Kay told National Public Radio that Saddam "had a large number of WMD program-related activities," repeating the awkward phrase used in Kay's interim report last October and repeated in President Bush's State of the Union address. "So there was a WMD program. It was going ahead. It was rudimentary in many areas." Later, he said that Iraq began retooling its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001 but never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya.

An A for effort.....
 

In other words, because Clinton thought x in 2000, Ricks is lying if he says something different in 2006 on the basis of additional information. We have beaten this to death. You have yet to prove that you know anything about the subject.

We weren't sure that containment was working before the war, although some of us were sufficiently sure of it that we would not have gone to war to find out. Now we know it was.

He told Congress in October 2003 -- which is to say, fairly early in his work, and while he was still working for the administration -- that:

• "We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW production effort. Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant, and BW production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers."
  
  "Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced - if not entirely destroyed - during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections. "
  
  "Despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material. However, Iraq did take steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program."

This is pretty damning stuff, and supports what Ricks says. My recollection is that Kay got much more blunt, and stopped trying to spin everything as supporting the Admininstration's claims, once he left government service.

An A for effort.....
 

Help me.

We believed he once had tons of chemical weapons- correct?

We asked him to prove he had destroyed it- he would not or could not prove it- correct?

How could "containment make you feel safe?

An A for effort.....
 

There are no perfect solutions. Containment carried risks. To understand where the WMD were, we would have had to invade and occupy the country, and that had its costs, too. And we still don't have perfect information.

eta: Knowing what we now know about Saddam's capabilities, is it not crystal clear that more Americans and Iraqis have died than would have died had we continued a strategy of containment?

As I said to you the other day, who gave a shit about chemical weapons? Lumping the chemical in with the biological and nuclear was a useful way of making him sound more menacing, but chemical weapons are difficult enough to use in a military context, and they weren't a threat to the U.S.

An A for effort.....
 

No he is being disengenuous because no one knows what happend to the WMDS, no one knows if they were still there when Bush entered office, and no one knows how effective Operation Desert Fox was.


Some of us??? Like your opinion matters. And how could you guys be so sure when Clinton wasn't sure. And we don't know if Saddam disposed of them when he realized Bush was serious. But in the end we just don't know.


Are these really that damning. We couldn't find BW mobile labs. Tell me something I don't know. Desert Storm, Fox, UN Sanctions and UN inspections reduced their ability to produce CWs. So it took all four of those things (not just Desert Fox) to prevent them from being able to produce anymore (that is not eliminate just produce more) CWs (that is not WMDs just CWs.). After 98 Saddam gave up trying to build a bomb but still held on to the technology in case later they decided to fire up the program again.

Doesn't seem that damning to me. Doesn't seem to back up your Washington Post reporter. And BTW - all my quotes by him were after he left the administration.

An A for effort.....
 

I think there are a bunch of kurds and Shites and WW1 soldiers and Iranian soldiers that would argue with you here- cept they're all dead:( But maybe you can cite a blog that says it's not so bad?

An A for effort.....
 

Here's one for you:
Yglesias thinks that Iran having nukes is no big deal.

An A for effort.....
 

I actually agree with most of this. However, I don't think any of the WMDs (not just chemical) were a threat to the US in a conventional sense. They were a threat to the neighbors but he was never going to deliver a WMD to the US without inlisting the aid of some terrorist group. Sure the Taliban did it, but that was before we were really paying attention. I think the WMD threat was to the neighbors and to the internal population. But of course, I would have supported the invasion without the WMDs so my opinion isn't very pertinent to this conversation.

An A for effort.....
 

You are not going to like hearing this, but I don't think there was much we could do to stop NK from getting Nukes, and there is not much we can do about Iran. With NK, Republicans point their finger at Clinton and Albright for screwing up, and the Dems point their fingers at current US policy on NK, but in reality nothing could be done. With all those artillary pieces aimed at Seoul, they were going to get their Nukes and we just had to suck it up. I think Iran is going to get a Nuke and there is nothing we can do in this case either. There just isn't the political support for an invasion, and air attacks won't do it. I am just glad I don't live in Tel Aviv.

Note to Taxwonk
 

There are far more muslims than non-muslims. In particular, there are more Arab muslims than Britons. Consequently, Reid represents a higher proportion of the British population than the 19 Arabs who acted on 9/11 are of the Arab muslim population. Does that mean that Britons are propotionately more likely to try to blow up a plane than an Arab Muslim?

Like I said, statistics can be used to prove almost anything. They are generally used to prove anything but the truth.

Asshole.

Victimhood
 

Ssshhh. Reid must be ignored, otherwise Spanky's "statistics" aren't as compelling. Besides, you shouldn't believe everything just because it's a fact. If you ignore the inconvenient ones, you might be more dogmatic. You'll be more stupid, but that's okay if you ignore that fact, too.

Victimhood
 

2. How we going to catch the UK guys when they start up? They look clean!

http://www.mugshots.com/IMAGES/P__richard-reid.jpg

or, god forbid, more John Walker Lindh's

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ad...er_enlarge.jpg

Note to Taxwonk
 

I don't even know where to begin with the stupidity of that statement.

Why don't you just be quiet before you make yourself look even dumber. There is not a single person on this board that agrees with your original assertion. Not one. Doesn't that tell you something? You find me one person on this board that doesn't think that, all things being equal, an Arab is more likely to hijack a plane than a Norwegian, then I will discuss this with the two of you.