Iraq: For Dan
Since Dan turned off HTML for the comments on his blog, I guess I'll have to post it here. If you aren't Dan, don't bother reading the rest of it unless you really want to chime in.
I wasn't insulting you. I was asking a legitimate question...
"Are you stupid? I'm astounded by the conclusions you are able to draw from thin air. Maybe you are a savant..."
Gee, thanks for the concerns for my health Dan. Shit, I'm glad you aren't a doctor. Your bedside manner sucks.
WMD: They don't seem to have existed, and certainly were not in a state sufficient to present a threat to us.
Don't read this piece or this one, it might cause your world view to shift without a clutch.
We've destablized a nation, and made it easier for terrorist to operate within it.
Oh yes, I forgot that there were no terrorists in Iraq and that Saddam wasn't sending money to the Palestinian families of suicide bombers. Oops...my mistake.
Mullahs will be running things.
And yet you're wrong again Dan. Should we try four out of seven?
Combine that with the secondary results of the loss of good faith with the rest of the world, the tarnishing of our image as moral leader, the weaking of our military position/flexibility, and the crimes committed in its name, and I don't really understand how you could say this was anything BUT a disaster.
Dan, I can't claim to guarantee that things will be better in Iraq in ten, twenty, or even fifty years. But I do think we gave them a much better chance than what they had under Saddam Hussein. Or do you just ignore what is going right in Iraq?
Comments
Brian - the Smash article you link to estimates in his professional opinion that it's 50% likely to be a false alarm completely. The Over Pressure article makes such assertions as "However, they are not suspected of production of G-nerve agent (sarin or tabun) until 1993, and not suspected of binary chemical capability until 1995...So this is definitely not an Iranian dud. It has to be a post Iran-Iraq War, post Desert Storm product."
Because, of course, logically they couldn't possibly have been producing them before we suspected they were.
The reality is that (1) single shell in a country the size of Iraq is NOT evidence of a WMD program.
You point to an ABC news source that says "the Shiites won't let it become a religious state again, because they don't want that", as though somehow the Shiites had the ability to control what the rest of the country does as well.
You talk about the "terrorists in Iraq" but the Fedayeen never actually *did* anything, did they? Did the Fedayeen blow up any US buildings? Did they poison our water supplies? did they do, hell ANYTHING AT ALL EXCEPT SURRENDER? :)
Dan's right that the occupation of Iraq by western force is, itself , a big recruitment campaign for terrorist organizations and they don't even have to pay for the airtime - CNN donates it to the cause.
Posted by: Derek | May 19, 2004 6:55 PM
Umm, that was the initial report from Smash. We now have confirmed reports that at least three liters of the binary components for Sarin were in that shell.
Here's the next problem with your theory. If the shell was a one-off, then logic would suggest the one off would be kept in a research facility and not a military depot. And if that's the case, don't you think it would be one of the first ones destroyed?
Also, Iraq didn't have an easy time of storing Sarin for a long time. The maximum shelf life they were seeing was around five years. Which puts it back to a minimum of 1999, years after he said he had got rid of all the sarin. Do you really think that one shell ISN'T a sign of a lack of a WMD program? I mean seriously, do you think some rouge scientist threw together some sarin and then put in the "easily carriable" 155mm cartridge?
And if you think they are getting guys in the millions to join, you are wrong. While it does bring out the worse people to attack the US in Iraq, at least it's in Iraq and not Chicago.
Posted by: Brian | May 19, 2004 9:01 PM