We all know that Saddam intentionally misled us to believe he had WMD's, right?

I get tired of running across posters who didn't get the 'memo.'

SADDAM INTENTIONALLY MISLED THE WORLD (and particularly Iran) INTO BELIEVING HE HAD WMD's TO PREVENT BEING ATTACKED.

Saddam had to convincingly bluff his neighbor-enemies into believing he had WMD's. This was revealed in the CBS News 60 Minutes program interview with FBI interrogator, George Piro, who spent months debriefing Saddam before he was hanged.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-3749494.html?pageNum=4

No intelligence service on Earth and no UN Inspections team was able to detect the truth of the WMD existence or non-existence. And with Saddam's previous SCUD attacks on Israel during Desert Storm, no one could doubt his willingness to destroy our ally Israel, if he did have WMD's.

And if Saddam launched a nuke or two at Israel, we feared waking up one day to a smoking crater where Israel had once been.

To prevent Israel from having to defend herself from this potentially existential threat and to assure the unimpeded flow of oil to the rest of the Western world (only a very small fraction of our domestic oil needs are supplied by Iraq) and to free the people from Saddam's brutality and to eliminate the possibility of Saddam mounting on-going terrorist efforts and put a halt to his continued violations of the 1991 Cease Fire terms, and to introduce liberal Democracy to the region, we invaded.

 

Well I agree with that. But why did the UK have to join in, for us we got nothing apart from wasted money and soliders killed just to pull out when the going got more difficult. This plus Afghanistan lead to 7/7, we should never have gone into Iraq and shouldn't have been in Afghanistan more than a year or two.

Now the UK and France want a no fly zone in Syria the US says no. We wanted a no fly zone in Libya the US said no until they saw Gaddafi being armed by the Chinese from Sudan. The political and foreign policy point of view from the UK government is always if we scratch America's back they will scratch ours, this isn't the case we should get rid of this stupid policy and forget about the "special relationship".

 

We know that Islamic radicals are bad guys. We also know that Assad is a bad guy. However, it hasn't yet been determined who the worst guys are in Syria. I think until we (our nations' military/intelligence people) know who's who we should watch how things develop.

And I suspect we'll always have a special relationship.

That is, until the Islamists take over Britain.

 

Actually, my take on this is very different.

While the Governments involved never publicly disclose Intelligence operations, we know that most of the Intelligence used prior to the invasion came from the UK. And we have had at least a couple of individuals in the Iraq administration turn evidence on their chemical weapons program.

I have always believed that the problem was that the source was so high up it was essentially unimpeachable. However, very few have ever actually considered if they were given correct information in the first place.

Iraq under Saddam was much like the USSR under Stalin. You simply nodded your head and said "Yes Sir", "No Sir" and "Whatever you say/want Sir". So if Saddam called up his researchers and asked "When these UN idiots finally leave we can resume production within 30 days, right?"

And of course the upper level said "Of course Saddam". The Middlemen likely said "Yea, if pigs fly". And the peons "in the trenches" more then likely said something like "are they freaking kidding us?"

I think the problem was actually that we had the "absolutely best optimistic answer as delivered to Saddam in a fantasy world", and this is what we accepted. Like the status of the Soviet Army prior to the attack by Germany in WWII, nobody dared lie to Saddam. The problem is that I doubt many of our analysts realized how badly he (and they) were lied to.

 

From the UK's point of view Assad isn't a bad guy at all, his wife is British and we had good trade deals and so on. My guess we really don't like Russia so we are trying to anoy Russia by getting rid of Assad and the Russians lose billions in arms deals. Iran will also come into it and Israel, but the UK doesn't really care about that and they don't really care about us. I would rather Assad stay in power, he doesn't really cause any problems for the UK.

There is no such thing as the "special relationship", like the US cares more about the UK than any other mid ranking power. I really don't think the UK gets anything from it anymore, the same goes for the EU. Christopher Meyer the UK ambassador to the US, who was around when Iraq was happening, said the UK military should really just be a second marine corps for US as the UK military is to small. This is what people in the foreign office think the special relationship should be.

Not going to happen, the UK has a state church and the monarchy stopping Islam. Secularism is a threat though to the British state, the church and monarchy, more so the another religion.

 

I've never understood why he was allowed to survive the first war, and why the allies thought it was a great idea to sit there for years waiting for Saddam to die of old age or something. True, the public has no access to all the intelligence and foreign relations info going on behind the scenes, but it was obvious Saddam was going to violate the cease fires non-stop for as long as he controlled any kind of military force, so why the wait?

It was indeed necessary to invade, we and other countries had defense agreements with Kuwait and others to uphold, so that is more than enough, and it doesn't matter what Bush lied about or anybody else; Saddam had to go no matter what the reasons given were, much as Johnson had to escalate SEATO operations in Viet Nam in his day. I do find it odd that some Brits now claim they had no business in the ME, since they played the key roles, along with France, in creating these countries from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after WW I, but apparently now feel no responsibilities for the political results of their own decisions? Pretty handy; same for France, Italy, and the rest, then sniveling about U.S. policies? Please, give us a break from the hypocrisy already.

The 'nation building' was doomed to failure, Arabs and Islamist countries aren't Japan and Germany, but it was still impossible to pull out and leave a vacuum for Iraq's neighbors to exploit, so since we had to be there anyway, might as well have given it a try; the Iraqis themselves decided to revert back to savagery and tribalism, so the failure is on them, same for Afghanistan's 'government' and its peoples' 'culture'.

 

Russia loses a naval base and a ally on Turkey's border. The 'Great Game' goes on, and will until Russia disappears; the world will just have to live with that fact, and Russia could care less what kinds of dictators they support, as long as they're pro-Russian, while Europe and the U.S. foreign policies are hamstrung by public opinion, usually completely uninformed opinions at that.

 

Two reasons;

1.UNSC resolution 678, which legitimized Desert Storm, only authorized use of military force to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It said nothing about regime change in Bagdad.

2.the Saudis, Egyptians, and other Sunni governments in the region saw Saddam as a valuable buffer and counter-force between themselves and the Shia regime in Iran. The Saudis in particular made it very clear they did not wish to see Saddam removed from power and they would pull the plug on the whole operation if it looked like that was what was going to happen.

 

This is rendered moot by Saddam's actions, along with the fact that the nature of dictatorships automatically demand regime change; there is no other option, particularly with ME regimes. Sometimes they 'resign', but Saddam didn't.

Then they should have used their own forces instead of supporting outside invasions; it was no longer their call once boots were on the ground. If they had pulled the plug, they would have been facing Iran alone, so that was never an option for them.

Letting Saddam remain for another few years was just bad strategy, period. There are very good reasons for demanding unconditional surrenders when going to war; the 20th Century, and the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan makes this even more obvious why appeasments and not learning history cost far more lives for western powers than necessary.

 

Sounds plausible enough. So, in your opinion did Saddam lie to his FBI interogator?

 

Gosh, it's nice to have your perspective here!

 

Very little that Saddam said could ever be trustworthy. His past screams of megalomaniac and sociopath. He would say and do anything if he thought it would keep his head out of the noose.

 

Iraq's position to the US was always that it had destroyed the WMD. We can now see his position was consistent right up to his death. There was no "urgent threat" from Iraq. Even if it had WMDs it had had them for 20 years and never provided them to terrorists (which would be against its own interest) or used them after the early 1980s. By March 2003 UN inspectors, who had had free access to the entire country, had conducted hundreds of unannounced spot inspections and found none of the WMD that Iraq was supposed to have had.

And prudent and honest leader would have held off an invasion under these circumstances. But the neocons that drove the Bush administration had ulterior motives.

 

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/201...nt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/

God I love this source. People who scream over and over that "Wikileaks is real!", then get their faces rubbed in the Wikileaks reports of WMDs that were indeed found in Iraq.

And then they deny they are real.

I guess they do not want to be hobgoblins.

 

I'm pretty sure about 40,000 dead Kurds would disagree with you about Saddam having WMD's. Of course they can't because he used WMD's to kill them; otherwise they would tell you the truth about his WMD's. The reason you see Syria using WMD's now on their people is because Saddam had a decade between Operating Desert Shield/Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom to move those WMD's out of Iraq and into Syria before the ground troops showed up.

 

So Saddam was so smart that he could fool all the US intelligence agencies, the British intelligence agencies, and George Bush and Dick Chaney. Only the last two are believable.

 

The real question is did we learn anything from the whole Iraq debacle?

This is crucial as we look towards Syria- which appears to have used chemical weapons recently.

If invasion of Iraq was justified because we believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction- i.e. chemical weapons- then at this point the same justification could be used for invading Syria.

Actually Syria is in many ways a better case for invasion- since it has a people in open revolt against the dictator that Bush called part of the "Axis of Evil".

I am really pondering on what the U.S. should do in regards to Syria.

 

Did they ever find evidence of this many dead Kurds? I know that there were all kinds of numbers flug around to justify the invasion of Iraq. But when US forces controlled the country and they actually started trying to find evidence of these massacres, the evidence they found was only a small fraction of pre-war claims.

 

I have a hard time with it too. There are two major factors against intervention in my mind: One is the question of whether the rebels in this case won't be worse than Assad, and 2) the lack of international consensus for intervention. It makes a difference whether you do have consensus (Lybia) or do not (Iraq).

 

BBC reported about 5K dead, but I was in Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield and Desert Storm and at the time the intel was showing closer to 35K to 40K. Now in 2013 we are estimating it was closer to 180K. Either way it's a lot of deaths and Sarin was used to do the job. I would say across the two exterminations; he murdered about a quarter million Kurds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq

Al-Anfal Campaign: In 1988, the Hussein regime began a campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living in Northern Iraq. This is known as the Anfal campaign. The campaign was mostly directed at Shiite Kurds (Faili Kurds) who sided with Iranians during the Iraq-Iran War. The attacks resulted in the death of at least 50,000 (some reports estimate as many as 182,000) people, many of them women and children. A team of Human Rights Watch investigators determined, after analyzing eighteen tons of captured Iraqi documents, testing soil samples and carrying out interviews with more than 350 witnesses, that the attacks on the Kurdish people were characterized by gross violations of human rights, including mass executions and disappearances of many tens of thousands of noncombatants, widespread use of chemical weapons including Sarin, mustard gas and nerve agents that killed thousands, the arbitrary imprisoning of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people for months in conditions of extreme deprivation, forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers after the demolition of their homes, and the wholesale destruction of nearly two thousand villages along with their schools, mosques, farms and power stations.[3][4]
In April 1991, after Saddam lost control of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War, he cracked down ruthlessly against several uprisings in the Kurdish north and the Shia south. His forces committed wholesale massacres and other gross human rights violations against both groups similar to the violations mentioned before. Estimates of deaths during that time range from 20,000 to 100,000 for Kurds, and 60,000 to 130,000 for Shi'ites.[5]

 

This is nothing new. There were reports of finds of old, obsolete or disabled chemical weapons back when US troops were desperately scouring Iraq for evidence of the WMDs we went to war over.

If they had found them, the neocons and Bush administration would have flooded the media with it.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Anfal_Campaign

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq501/events_anfal.html

 

Exactly my point. Claims that there were up to 180,000 massacred, but regarding hard evidence: "on September 1, 2004, U.S. forces in Iraq discovered hundreds of bodies of Kurdish women and children at the site near al-Hatra, believed to be executed in early 1988 or late 1987.[13]" And that's it. Where is all the other evidence of these massacres?

So many lies and distortions about Iraq and Hussein were fabricated by the neocon pro-war instigators that I am, I'm afraid, terribly cynical about any claims made about Iraq and Hussein. Not that I think he was a swell guy, but there was so much propaganda and disinformation and outright fabrication about him by the neocons to justify the invasion that I take anything I read with a large does of salt.

 

I have no idea how old you are, but I am sure that many of us alive at the time have no problem recounting the events of that time.

Some images I wish I could remove from my mind, but I am unable to do so.



Sorry, but all I see is apparently an apologist for genocide and the use of chemical weapons. You are pretending it never happened, or I guess it was not horrific enough to condemn.

Please tell us again how this did not happen.

 

There were several agendas being played out by different people/departments/organizations/nations simultaneously.

If you had the heavy responsibility of making sure your most trusted Middle East ally did not vanish in a mushroom cloud are you saying you'd have gone "all in" with the knowledge Bush had at the time???

Even with what you know now about the CBS 60 Minutes interview with Saddam's FBI interogator's revelation of Saddam's admission of deceit for the purpose of self preservation???