As I posted before, WMDs were found in Iraq. A brutal, genocidal dictator was removed. Those are things that happened, and both Democrats and Republicans agreed should happen.
President Assad visits the frontline in the Jobar district of Damascus. [video=youtube_share;Rvi9f3x0gyA]http://youtu.be/Rvi9f3x0gyA?t=2m27s[/video]
Not as simple as Mr.Simple would believe it to be . Conflicting reports . I presume neither of us was in Iraq its just a case of which reports you choose to accept. read my siggy "The news and truth are not the same thing."- - (Walter Lippman) ============== No, There's Still No Evidence There Was an Active WMD Program in Iraq Wed Oct. 15, 2014 "C.J. Chivers of the New York Times has a long piece today about chemical weapons found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. A few dead-enders are now gleefully claiming that Bush was right after all. Iraq did have WMD! (HUH ?) This is ridiculous enough that—so far, at least—the savvier wing of the conservative movement is staying mum about the whole thing. There are three main reasons for this. First, most of these weapons were rotting remnants of artillery shells used during the Iraq-Iran war in the 80s and stored at Iraq's Muthanna State Establishment as well as other nearby sites. Murtaza Hussain of the Intercept explains what this means: The U.S. was aware of the existence of such weapons at the Al Muthanna site as far back as 1991. Why? Because Al Muthanna was the site where the UN ordered Saddam Hussein to dispose of his declared chemical munitions in the first place. Those weapons that could not safely be destroyed were sealed and left to decay on their own, which they did. The site was neither “active” nor “clandestine” — it was a declared munitions dump being used to hold the corroded weapons which Western powers themselves had in most cases helped Saddam procure. In other words, these shells weren't evidence of an active WMD program, which had been George Bush's justification for the war. They were simply old munitions that everyone knew about already and that were being left to degrade on their own. Second, the Bush administration kept its discoveries secret. If any of this were truly evidence for an active WMD program, surely Bush and Dick Cheney would have been the first to trumpet the news. The fact that they didn't is pretty plain evidence that there was nothing here to back up their prewar contentions of an Iraqi WMD program. Third, there's the specific reason these discoveries were kept secret. Chivers tells the story: Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the United States suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong.. ..Others pointed to another embarrassment. In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies. Far from being a smoking gun of Saddam Hussein's continuing quest for illegal WMDs, these discoveries were evidence that Western powers in the 80s were perfectly happy to supply illegal WMDs to an ally as long as they were destined for use against Iran. This was not something Bush was eager to acknowledge. Iraq had no active WMD program, and it was an embarrassment to the Bush administration that all they could find were old, rotting chemical weapons originally manufactured by the West. So they kept it a secret, even from troops in the field and military doctors. But lies beget lies, and American troops are the ones who paid the price. According to Chivers, "The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds." Today, the consequences of our lies continue to haunt us as the rotting carcasses of these weapons are apparently falling into the hands of ISIS. Unfortunately, no mere summary can do justice to this entire shameful episode. Read Chivers' entire piece to get the whole story. Cheers ....
. So what ? Its obvious that you have failed to produce any evidence from any sort of reliable source to contradict what I've posted. chew on this : Thursday 12 June 2014 Life was better in Iraq under Saddam [/B Iraq has begun to slip into anarchy, but it wasn't always like this. It used to be a much happier and safer place to live. News that Islamic extremists have conquered Mosul took me back 30 years, to memories of a weekend in the city when I responded to the latest caesura between me and my then-girlfriend in a sane, mature fashion, by drinking as much of a bottle of whisky as I could before passing out. Iraq, it seems, is about to descend once more into anarchy and chaos, but it wasn’t like that when I worked there in 1983 and ’84, and again in ’86. When the US and Britain led the invasion in 2003, for what turned out to be no good reason, I found myself wondering whether the removal of Saddam Hussain was all it was cracked up to be. And that question has come back into my head this week. Did the lives of most ordinary Iraqis get better? I don’t think so. And now they’re about to get a whole lot worse. I was working as an operating department assistant in Baghdad – like a theatre nurse, but trained just for theatre – in a hospital the Iraqi government had set up to carry out big operations that previously they would have sent abroad. There was universal health care in Iraq, and universal education. Few people were well off but nobody, as far as I could tell, starved. True, all we had to go on was the English-language newspaper the Baghdad Observer, with its daily cover stories about Saddam’s latest visit to an adoring Kurd village (this was before the notorious gas attack on Halabja), but national misery is difficult to keep off the streets, and people seemed happy. Baghdad was noisy and mucky and full of building sites, but it was bustling and thriving. There wasn’t a huge amount in the shops, but people had all they needed to get by. If you were Kurdish, or a dissident, life wasn’t like that, and I’m not suggesting for a second that we should forget their suffering. But by and large, life was OK in Saddam’s dictatorship. It was a secular state, and Sunnis and Shias seemed to bump along together; there were plenty of Christians, and even a few Jews left (though they had experienced persecution). It may have been brainwashing, but Iraqis I came across adored Saddam. Often, as patients drifted off in the anaesthetic room they would invoke his name, sometimes screaming, “Saddaaaaam! Sadaaaaam!” Those who knew some English might mutter to me, “Saddam will take care of me” as their eyes closed. I’m not saying that this is necessarily a good thing – the psychology of living under a dictator has been much explored, and I doubt much of it makes pleasant reading – but the fact that it was usually just me, them and the anaesthetist there suggests that it wasn’t done out of fear. So Iraq, when I was there, was a fully functioning state in which it was possible to live a fulfilled life. I’m aware that what I’m saying may be the equivalent of observing that Hitler made the trains run on time. But I wonder how many Iraqis today – particularly those in flight, with nothing but their children and a few hastily gathered possessions – look back on the Saddam years. Years of oppression? Or years of tolerable normality, when life wasn’t so bad at all? http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/it-was-better-to-live-in-iraq-under-saddam-9532742.htm Frankly , I'd rather accept the words of a real person - Chris Maume than someone on a forum calling himself "Army soldier." Tata. ...
