What if there were WMD's in Iraq? Hat's on!

[mikelewis]

I was listening to Randi Rhodes and she was talking about the true intent was to start the Iraqi insurgency so the corporations could steal everything from the "Oil, money, to the towels".

What if there really were WMD's in Iraq. The story is they never existed but every intelligence report we had said they did. Maybe the intelligence wasn't wrong.

[justiceischeap]

1. Just so I get this straight, an analogy

That would be like saying because the exit polls predicted a Kerry win then he really did win?

[mogster]

29. Good observation ;-) n/t

[Career Prole]

2. The WMD's were up Shrub's ass with the flying monkeys.

"The story is they never existed but every intelligence report we had said they did."

Nope. The story was they existed and every inspection report said they didn't.

[punpirate]

3. Where _exactly_ have you been...

... in the past two years? Everything the administration said suggested they did. Every report (including the footnotes at the end of the Oct., 2002, NIE) said the intelligence was dubious, at best.

Every report after the invasion has said they didn't have any, and haven't had since the introduction of UNSCOM after the Gulf War.

So, on what do you base the statement, "every intelligence report we had said they did?"

What was said about Iraq, the distortion of intelligence, the outright lies, are no different than what was said about the Soviet Union during the Ford and Reagan administrations, despite contrary intelligence evidence. Why? Because the same neo-con ideologues were running the show. Same-same.

[mikelewis]

4. Yeah, but I'm only musing out loud... what if the intell wasn't a lie

[blondeatlast]

6. So, then, what's YOUR take on the imagined scenario?

Mine: If they really were there, we would NEVER have invaded.

[punpirate]

I would say, then...

... that the proof is in the pudding. What was the Iraqi military response to the invasion? To fling everything they had at American and British forces? No. They saw tanks in Baghdad in 2-1/2 weeks.

What was the result of more than a year of inspections by our own intelligence and military, the so-called Iraq Survey Team? They didn't find anything of note, and what little was found dates before 1991.

Did Saddam unleash chemical weapons via drone aircraft on the United States? No. It wasn't even possible.

And, you are speaking of two different kinds of intelligence. One, coming from sources normally considered to be neutral--the general body of CIA analysts, and the second, coming from within the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, through the Office of Special Plans, which took every outrageous claim by Chalabi and his people as fact, and immediately passed them on to the White House, without vetting, where they promptly got into the nightly news.

The latter is not intelligence. It's propaganda. That's what you've been calling intelligence....

Sorry, but, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, "You're entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts."

The fact is that the American people were hustled by neo-con men, the very same ones who have been advocating imperial ambitions for the US for a long, long time.

[leesa]

15. Duh! The Intell WASN'T a lie! They said there were no WMDs

What are you talking about??

[librechik]

20. exactly--the "bad" intelligence came right out of Chalabi's ass

to Dick Cheney, and didn't stop for vetting in between. And it wasn't "real", it was FICTION.

[patdem]

5. What IF grasshoppers had six shooters..birds would not fvck with them

follow IF with any statement you wish...cause it is all meaningless...

I love you BUT...BUT negates all words prior to BUT...see the English language allows us all to be liars and crooks and PRETEND to be honest hard working folk!

[mattclearing]

27. Thanks for calling this out. Lamest hypothetical ever. I alerted, too.

Asking what if there really were WMD in Iraq is like asking what if the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was justified. History doesn't bear it out, and there's no reason to believe there was.

Even so, if there were WMD in Iraq, we would have supplied them, with many of the same folks that planned the recent war. The pic of Rumsfeld and Hussein comes to mind.

What if the sky were orange? What if birds croaked? What if Shrub is super-smart?

What if Mike Lewis had a point?

[Old and In the Way]

7. If they had battlefield WMD.............

I don't think Bush would have invaded.

I suspect if they existed, Saddam would have had no reason not to employ them. We've had Iraq on a tight leash since DS1....we knew the state of their army and infrastructure. And all the UN inspections could put nothing tangible on the record.

No, the invasion of the ME was in the PNAC plan since the mid-90's. Iraq was #1 on their hit list. But they needed a reason to justify their invasion and takeover of the oilfields. Nothing like a 6 month PR campaign that employs the Republican corporate media to scare the public into thinking that we were 45 minutes away from mushroom clouds to make a bogus case work.

The fact that they had a 3rd rate army made the invasion a no-brainer for the AWOL Chickenhawk-in-chief.

[Liberal Veteran]

8. There were WMD in Iraq.

The overwhelming majority of them were destroyed during the inspection process throughout the 90's.

When we invaded, not only were no stockpiles of WMD, there were no evidence that there has been an active weapons program in Iraq for quite some time. There were a lot of guesses and such based on what Saddam COULD have produced if he were actually running a clandestine WMD program, but they didn't really exist.

When we went to Iraq, it was after MONTHS where every single world eye, satellite, inspectors, and spies were on the ground watching Iraq. There was absolutely no possible way that Saddam possessed the capability to destroy, dismantle, or move out of the country the kind of weapons programs we were misled to believe existed by the administration.

Once we got on the ground with the military, there was no possible way for an organized dismantling and hiding of WMD could even remotely have taken place.

We've have had inspection team after inspection team go into Iraq with unfettered access since we invaded and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM has come back with the exact same conclusion: Iraq destroyed its weapons during the 90's and dismantled its programs long before we thought about invading.

[two gun sid]

9. Hold on

There was no credible intelligence that Iraq had WMD's. The Bush administration took questionable intel from discredited sources and used it to sell this war to the American people. Bush himself even says that the intel was no good. He and Dr. Rice blamed the CIA with providing bad information. The fact that Bush himself says the intel was wrong tells me that we never had any credible knowledge of Iraqi WMD's. The question for me is did the administration knowingly use faulty intel to sell this war and if they did why?

[txaslftist]

10. Seriously, why just blast this thread?

Let's assume Saddam had WMDs. It's horse manure, but let's play let's suppose. What would they have been? Most likely mustard gas or possibly black market nerve agents, extremely thin likelihood of some diluted form of smallpox...Nukes? No friggin' way. But since we're in hypothetical land, let's suppose.

So what? France presumably has all of those things, so did our one time arch enemy, the USSR. Then what?

Would Saddam have posed a threat to the US if he'd had them? NO. Well...didn't he hate us? Sure, so does Qadaffi, so does Putin (contrary opinions notwithstanding), so does Kim Jong Il, so did Brezhnev (ok, I can't spell it on the fly). Has the US ever been directly attacked by a weapon of mass destruction?

(Remember that the North Korean govt. has told its people that we are at war with them and they are under constant threat from the U.S.)

No. Why not? Traceability, accountability, certain destruction at our hands. Do you think Saddam was not aware of that? Hell, he wouldn't have even invaded Quwait if Bush I hadn't given him tacit approval. ("We have no interest in your internal affairs or your border dispute with Quwait"-George Bush Senior)

Even WITH WMDs, he was not a threat to us. We planned to invade Iraq prior to 9-11, and we went ahead and did it, using 9-11 as an excuse. Welcome to Amerika, and stop drinking the Koolaid!:eyes:

[RafterMan]

11. I agree there was no threat

but I don't think that was the focus of the post.

[txaslftist]

12. then what was it?

[RafterMan]

17. Sorry I misread it

reading again I don't know what the focus of the post was.

[txaslftist]

26. Then we're on the same page.

[shraby]

13. You can google Office of Special Plans

and find out where the bad intel came from..Chalabi. Sy Hersh wrote an article about the Office of Special Plans in April of 2003. Karen Kwaitowski (sp?) described it because she worked in that department.

Also if Saddam had wmds why didn't he use them on our troops in order to repel our invasion?

[leesa]

16. And, of course, the US has 100x more of these things than other

countries and we USE them regularily on assorted brown people.

[leesa]

14. You are incorrect. The CIA AND the UN inspection team said it was highly

unlikely they existed. The country has been under microscopic surveillance for twelve years prior to Bush's illegal invasion. There is no way there were WMDs and Bush knew it. He is a traitor.

[LynnTheDem]

18. No actually, every intell report DID NOT say they had WMD.

IAEA said no WMD.

UNMOVIC said no WMD

Mossad said unlikely

DIA said nope

USAF said nope

Etc etc etc.

[ElectroPrincess]

19. No Bush WANTED the intelligence to say so and Cheney was visiting

the CIA every week to "Make it so". This is conjecture but I believe wholeheartedly that this is a case of "giving the boss what he wants."

It was bad Command Leadership (The Bush Executive Branch)
NOT poor Intelligence Reporting.

[robbedvoter]

21. It still wouldn't have justified a war - as inspectors were keeping an eye

on things. As it is, we lnow for a fact that WMD was one of the pretextx. W said in 2002: "F Saddam, he's going down". And in 1999, he told his biographer:


http://russbaker.com/Guerrilla%20News%20Network%20-%20B...
“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

So, your speculation is pointless. This was a war without grounds, no matter how you look at it. Nice try. Dismissed.

[mikelewis]

22. My question is... what if this was a ruse to get WMD's into the

hand of "terrorists"? If the goal of Iraq is perpetual war, why not arm the terrorists with WMD's from Iraq?

Kerry voted for the war, hell, almost every Senator voted for the war. The "fake" intel that they were viewing very well may have been real.

[OhioBlue]

23. HUH???

The fake Intel has already been debunked in several follow ups. Also, from what I remember, the congress only saw the Intel that the admin insiders filtered to them. Remember that the weapons inspectors were in Iraq and * pulled them out. My guess is that he was advised that if he left them there too long, they would find evidence that would not support their agenda. I think the * admin and the neocons are capable of a ton of illegal and immoral acts, but I really would have a hard time believing that they would create a story, prove themselves wrong and allow WMDs into the hands of the likes of Al Queda. Besides, I have absolutely no reason to believe there is any possible way the logistics of transferring WMDs from Saddam's regime to Al Queda could go unnoticed nor would it make any sense. They were enemies. It makes no sense.

[DireStrike]

24. Nah. Easier ways to do it, if you're gonna do that sorta thing. -nt-

[robbedvoter]

25. 22 Senators and oner 100 reps voted against. people who knew

what they were talking about warned them not to do it (Wes Clark)
They don't need a war to arm the terraists. They need a contract (see history with OBL and Raygun/Poppy)

[truth2power]

30. if the goal of Iraq is perpetual war???

You're confused. The goal of PNAC is perpetual war.

Or maybe I'm just having a really hard time following this.

[Taxloss]

28. The intelligence didn't say they existed.

It said they might exist, possibly existed, had once existed, were likely to exist. All sorts of different caveats, codicils and qualifiers. It was the US and UK governments that said they did, certainly, exist.