They'll tell you it's too expensive to have printers on all the voting machines. (Even though Diebold is the same company that somehow figured out a way to give you a receipt for every transaction you make at an ATM.)
Um, no they don't. Diebold is selling a voting machine right now that offers a paper trail.
Even if he could have complied, and the invasion was was authorized, I would still oppose it, on moral grounds, rather than legal, so lets skip to the end... (I don't think either of us is going to convince the other of anything on those maters).
Moral? What in your mind is moral about allowing a murderous dictator promote terrorism, develop lethal weapons, torture and kill his own people, and defy the UN?
P.S. Have you thought about the military? Honestly? I considered it after 9/11. I Almost joined the marine reserves, but then I thought about it, and decided something like Iraq was likely, and changed plans.
This might be my last reply to you; you are obviosly not reading the most central part of what I am writing.
Please tell me which part you think I am ignoring.
The security council threatened over a dozen times, it never approved use of force. There are good legal minds on both sides of this debate, but almost all of them on your side are American or British.
Ok- here is the authorization to use force in Resolution 678:
2. Authorizes Member States co-operating with the Government of Kuwait, unless Iraq on or before 15 January 1991 fully implements, as set forth in paragraph 1 above, the above-mentioned resolutions, to use
all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area;
1. Affirms all thirteen resolutions noted above, except as expressly changed below to achieve the goals of this resolution
I don't know how it could be more clear than that- the use of all necessary means was explicitly given to achieve the goals of 687, which were for Iraq to stop supporting terrorists and to get rid of all of their WMD programs.
This is what you are not hearing:
I never said they were in compliance! Show me where I did. I infact stated that their failure to comply was inevitable, due to the condiditons required for compliance. It is not a mater of moving goalposts. The problem is that the onus was on Saddam to prove he was WMD free. This is imposible to do.
And here is where you are not hearing me. The UN didn't just say to Saddam "Prove you don't have WMD". Instead, they they asked "What happened to the 331 tonnes of precursors for Tabun that you imported?" or "What happened to the 160 aerial bombs filled with Sarin agents that you declared to the UN". Every single subject in the Unresolved Disarmament Issues document ends with a bulleted list of actions that Iraq could take to help resolve the issue. These are clear and simple requests, such as "Provide the name and present location of the Air Force officer that wrote this document about Mustard Gas" or "Tell us why you had a 700,000 Dinar credit balance with foreign chemical suppliers in 1988". Failure to comply was not inevitable! Iraq was not in compliance because they chose not to be.
Violation of a resolution doesn't mean a severe threat.
The UN Security Council unanimously passed those resolutions precisely because Iraq posed a threat.
There are a lot of counties with WMD, Iraq didn't have signifigant amounts (yeah, they could have begun making it again... so could anyone).
Other countries were not under international orders to disarm their WMD.
Our allies also told us he was buying yellow cake in Africa. Inteligence is a highly foulable art form, forgive me for being sceptical.
Allies told us he was seeking uranium in Africa, and this has been confirmed by multiple sources.
As for how long to wait. I don't think it is morally OK to attack anyone because of their ability to attack. In short, I don't think preventive warfare is OK. If it is OK to attack a nation because it has the ability to attack you, and even a demonstrated willingness to attack others, think of what that means if the shoe is on the other foot. Iran and North Korea are justified in attacking the US by the moral standard we hold ourselves to.
That said, if an attack is eminent, war is no longer preventative, and is thus justifiable. So to use the Pearl Harbor analogy. If we had intel that said an attack on Pearl was coming soon. I would wait until there was a wave of bombers in the air coming toward Pearl, then scramble intercepters.
Ok- so when is an attack imminent? At what point did th
Kofi Annan, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali disagree. Both have stated that the invasion of Iraq violated international law.
Well, Kofi Annan made a comment a while back that he thought it was illegal, and he got such a strong reaction that he hasn't repeated that claim since- even when directly asked.
But Boutros Boutros-Ghali has never claimed that. On the contrary, he has publicly spoken many times about the authorization implicit in resolutions 678 and 687. For example, after the US, UK, and France attacked some Iraqi sites in 1993, he said
The raid yesterday and the forces that carried out the raid have received a mandate from the Security Council according to Resolution 678, and the cause of the raid was the violation by Iraq of Resolution 687 concerning the ceasefire. So, as Secretary General of the United Nations, I can say that this action was taken and conforms to the resolutions of the Security Council and conforms to the Charter of the United Nations.
This is the exact same justification that we had to invade Iraq in 2003, and his answer is just as applicable today. This is also the position of the government of the US, UK, Italy, Australia, Spain, Poland, and many others.
Compliance on WMD is imposible to satisfy, that was the subject of most of my argument.
No- it wasn't. Resolution 1284 that was passed back in 1999 addressed this problem by requiring the creation of the "key disarmament tasks" document. According to 1284, this document detailed what was required of Iraq to bring them into compliance and to avoid any "moving of the goalposts" with regard to their disarmament responsibilities. This document was delivered to Iraq in 1999. A follow up of this document was prepared by UNMOVIC and delivered in 2003. I have already linked to both of these documents in this thread. Compliance was very clearly defined for Iraq; they just chose to not do it. The ISG confirmed this when they discovered dozens of illegal weapons programs in Iraq that the UN did not know about. So, yeah, I guess compliance on WMD was impossible for Iraq to satisfy because they were still trying to develop illegal weapons.
Does the charter not state that war should not be waged without the approval of the security counsel? (Don't try to agrue that it was a legal war becasue we were enforcing the resolutions of an organisation whose laws say that our acts of enforcement were illegal, there is just too much cognitive dissonance there)
Wow- talk about cognitive dissonance. The Security Council did approve of military action over a dozen times.
Honestly it has been a while since I read 687... You are going to have to refresh my memory as to how it is concretecompliance is possible. If I recall correctly that is one of them that calls on Iraq to prove it is free of weapons by allowing inspections. Well, the inspectors didn't find anything (significant) and yet many were convinced that Iraq had banned weapons.
Iraq was ordered to unconditionally accept under international supervision the destruction of all of their WMDs and all related subsystems and components, research, and manufacturing facilities. This was not a detective work- Saddam was required to bring us to his weapons sites and let us watch him destroy them. He never did. Here is a chronology of events during the 1990's to see what he did instead. Iraq was NOT in compliance with the UN mandate, which was confirmed by the 1200 page ISG report.
So how exactly is it possible to prove that you don't have something when the accuser can simply claim that you must be hidding it?
Once again, I refer you to the documents that UNSCOM and UNMOVIC sent to Iraq which clearly detailed what Iraq needed to do to satisfy the commissions. Iraq was supposed to be an active participant, but instead they blatantly lied to and obstructed the inspectors for 12 years.
SOA has gone alot further than having graduates that became criminals. SOA explicitly trained people in the use of guerilla tactics against populations to inspire fear as a means to influence elections.
I would love to know where you got this "information" about the operation of a secret training facility.
Some of this is true, some is almost hyperbolically exadgerated. But I will say that if I were in charge of national security, I would go through this process:
1. Gather information
We did this for over 12 years.
2. Identify threats 3. Prioritize threats
Who else in the world was in defiance of over a dozen unanimous Chapter VII Security Council resolutions? Who else had illegal WMD capabilities and had shown a willingness to use these weapons in the past? Who else had supported dozens of terrorist organizations for 25 years and had tried to direct terrorist attacks against us multiple times over the past decade? Sure, there are other threats, but Saddam was pretty high up on that list.
4. Determine what action has the best likelyhood of positive results
Seeding democracy in the Middle East has a huge likelihood of long term positive results.
5. Determine if the likely results of that action are better than the likely results of inaction
The ISG reported that Iraq had the supplies, procurement systems, and infrastructure in place to go to full scale mustard gas production within 2 months. Our allies warned us that Saddam was plotting more terrorist attacks against us- how long would you have liked to wait?
What are you talking about? We voted for at least a half a dozen UN resolutions condemning Iraq for it's chemical weapon use in the 1980s (see resolutions 540, 582, 588, 598, 612, and 620). It was because of his use of chemical weapons that we worked to get resolution 687 passed which required Iraq to completely disarm ALL of its WMD and WMD programs. You've got a strange definition of "backing".
Why? Because TamMan2000 says so? You are going to have to do better than that.
There was nothing illegal or against the UN charter with our 2003 invasion of Iraq. On the contrary, the UN charter mandates that member states enforce Chapter VII resolutions, which we did.
And the fact that we have a security counsel veto is the only thing that has kept chapter VII resolutions off our ass. That and the fact that nobody wants to try to enforce one on the sole remaining super power, Iraq is easy to pick on, the US, not so much... In addition to that, many of the 17 resolutions Iraq was in violation of were written specifically so that compliance was either impossible or subjective (cheezedawg, you have WMD, prove otherwise), in other words they were written so that their garaunteed violation could be political capital.
That is baloney. Have you read resolution 687 or any of the subsequent resolutions? How about this 1999 letter that UNSCOM gave Iraq about how to satisfy the commission. Or the 175 page Unresolved Disarmament Issues document that UNMOVIC delivered to Iraq in 2003. Iraq's requirements to resolve these issues were very clearly communicated to them- they just ignored them.
Does the phrase Salvadoran death-squad mean any thing to you? How about School of the Americas?
Are you unaware of these, or are these not considered supporting terrorism to achieve our goals in your book?
No, I don't consider the SOA as supporting terrorism, because there is no evidence that they do. Sure, some people affiliated with it later turned out to be criminals, but if this is your standard, then places like the Univ of Michigan, UCLA, Wichita State, and pretty much any institution in the world "support" terrorism.
The use of force was threatened, and the demands went unheaded, but the resolution to back up the threat was never passed, correct?
The authorization to use military force was given in resolution 678. You should read it sometime.
Besides, you are dodging the real issue on this question. I did not say Iraq was not a threat. I said everyone is a threat. The point is that if you set out to prove that any group is a threat, and you have a decent spin/research staff, you will suceed. Of course Iraq was found to be a threat, it is a forgone conclusion...
No, you are dodging the issue. Iraq was a country that in the recent past had illegally tried to expand its borders (twice), launched unprovoked missile attacks on 3 of its neighbors, used chemical weapons against its own people and against Iran, was in open defiance of international orders to disarm, directly supported dozens of terrorist organizations, had tried to direct terrorist attacks against the United States multiple times, and was trying to plan even more attacks against us up until the invasion. If you can't see this as a unique threat, then I am glad that you are not in charge of our national security.
In addition to this threat, there were a number of strategic goals of the invasion, with countering the hate and oppression in the area with freedom and democracy at the top of that list. For lots of reasons, Iraq was the best place to start with these goals. It isn't perfect, but war never is.
Are you aware that the United States is in violation of UN mandate?
Chapter VII resolutions are the only UN resolutions that are enforceable in any context. The United States has never been the subject of a Chapter VII resolution. Iraq, on the other hand, was in violation of 17 of them. Try to keep your comparisons on topic.
Are you aware that the United States has recently supported (perhaps currently supporting) terrorists?
It has never been US policy to support terrorism or use terrorism to achieve its goals. Your moral equivalence is crap.
Did you know that to some degree, every nation on the face of the earth is a threat to every other nation's national security?
The UN security council sat down 17 times and unanimously decided that Iraq's weapons were a threat to international peace and security, and they specifically authorized the use of military force to disarm them of those weapons. This is not some story that President Bush cooked up to justify an invasion- this is documented history. Why are you trying to downplay that?
They may very well be true. They are also completely besides the point.
I beg to differ. That is exactly the point, and has been since day one.
Weapons of Mass destruction was the original justification for going to war.
Saddam's illegal WMD programs were only part of the justification, and considering what the ISG and UNMOVIC have found in Iraq since the invasion, it was a pretty solid justification. True, we didn't find the decade old decaying stockpiles that we thought we were going to find, but instead we found programs and infrastructure that prompted David Kay to say that Iraq was even a greater threat than we thought they were when we invaded.
Hell our closest allies even flat out admit Bush was bent on military action before anything else. (Downing Street Memos...heard of them perhaps?)
The Downing Street memos are not an admission of anything. One ambiguous use of the word "fixed" by somebody who isn't even in a position to speak for US intelligence is not as damning as you seem to believe- especially considering Blair and Straw have strongly denounced your interpretation.
Do you seriously think there are fewer terrorists in Iraq now than there were before we invaded?
Who knows? Not me, and certainly not you. We are killing a lot of terrorists in Iraq. Are we killing more than are being created by us being there? Hopefully, but only time will tell.
Like we did with Iraq, we are first exhausting other options with Iran before turning to military action.
North Korea is arguably as much as or more of a threat than Saddam was under sanctions. But we don't invade them...how come?
First of all, I don't think any body argues that the DPRK posed more of a threat than Saddam. But that is irrelevant- pointing out that other threats exist does not negate the fact that Iraq posed a threat. North Korea is a VERY different situation than Iraq. Kim Jong Il is a desperate and egotistical leader that is probably only looking for international aid and recognition. The biggest threat he poses is that he might share technologies with groups of people that, unlike him, would actually use it against us. The 6-party talks have resumed and are progressing nicely this week, and there is no reason to believe that they will fail.
On the other hand, if you said that Iraq was in violation of its UN mandated disarmament requirements, that Iraq was supporting terrorists, and that Iraq posed a threat to our national security, those were not lies because they are all true.
I'm going to stop you right there. We haven't officially learned ANYTHING- we don't even know if a crime was committed in the first place. Rove learned about Plame from other journalists, so if there was a "leak", it happened before Rove was even involved.
But all of the available evidence points to the fact that there wasn't a leak of confidential information at all. Wilson himself says that his wife was not a covert operative at the time of Novak's article, and it was apparently common knowledge in her neighborhood that Plame worked for the CIA. The reporters that told Rove about Plame could have got the information from anywhere.
The fact that Wilson's wife did work for the CIA, and even more, that she was the one that recommended him for the trip to Niger (not the Vice President like Wilson claimed), is very relevent to the story because it proves Wilson lied about his trip. It is already known that he lied about his trip findings, and now the very genesis of the trip was a lie as well.
Uh, this is kind of fundamental to our justice system. The grand jury is investigating whether or not a crime was committed. If they determine that there is enough evidence that a crime was committed, then they may issue some indictments, and we may see a trial. None of this implies guilt.
Another example of AMD trying to win in the marketplace through whining. There is nothing preventing AMD from releasing their own compiler. Instead they are just bitching about Intel again.
Intel doesn't come close to a monopoly in the compiler market, so I fail to see what this has to do with the antitrust suit.
If you disagree with the parent, be a man and argue the point with him. Don't mod him as 'flamebait' merely because what he says makes you feel uncomfortable.
You are right- don't mark his post as flamebait because you ar uncomfortable- instead mod him as flamebait because he is WRONG. Diebold does market electronic voting systems that have a paper trail. That kinda deflates your conspiracy theories, doesnt it?
Fascinating. You seem to be simultaneously arguing against the 2-party system and the multi-party system. According to the requirements in your post, a single party system would be the "best".
The fact is the two-party system is one of the greatest strengths of the United States. It forces compromise, and guarantees the largest proportion of the populated will be represented. It also provides stability because it makes it impossible for a radical leader to come to power. That is why we end up with Presidents like Bill Clinton and George W Bush instead of Hitler. If you take away the two party system, you take away one of the things that makes this country great.
The US violated international law by invading and occupying Iraq, and you want to talk about doing things by the (that is, your) book?
International law does not mean "everything UnrefinedLayman agrees with." There was nothing "illegal" about our invasion of Iraq. The UN Security Council gave explicit authorization in resolution 678 to use military force to enforce the cease-fire demands of resolution 687. This authorization was confirmed over a dozen times in the decade that followed, including resolution 1441 that gave Iraq one final chance to comply.
And how many of these people on the list were actually prevented from voting? The answer is that we don't know, but the USCCR wasn't able to find a single person that was.
Greg Palast is so twisted up in hate that he can't see straight. His conclusions are not supported by any of the data he presents. Yet, people are so eager to hate President Bush that they are willing to accept his fluff at face value. Its sad, really.
ChoicePoint/DBT originally produced a list of about 8000 voters to remove from the electoral rolls. Katherine Harris got back to them and told them to widen the net - by omitting a few data integrity requirements, such as middle names, dates of birth, and dates and details of their convictions - and assured ChoicePoint that they needn't worry about the number of false positives in the list. This increased the size of the list to about 58,000 voters, more than half of whom were African-Americans.
When the fraud was officially investigated, ChoicePoint admitted to a false-positive rate of up to 15%, which was already far in excess of Bush's lead in the Florida poll. Later, an independent investigation showed an error rate of more than 90% - some 55,000 voters, some 30,000 of whom were black.
What you seem to be missing here is that a false positive on the felon list does not mean that person was disenfranchised. Instead it meant that the election supervisor of the county that the individual lived in was required to verify that they were eligible to vote (that is, if the county used the felon list at all- over half of the counties ignored the list completely). You see, the list was designed to have false positives. As Katherine Harris said, it was supposed to cast a wide net to find ineligible voters that were registered to vote. In other words, if somebody was disenfranchised, it is the County Election Supervisor's fault.
So please stop calling it "fraud". There was no fraud here.
This is a flat-out lie. Read some first-hand accounts of voter disenfranchisement for yourselves. Voters were erroneously scrubbed from the electoral roll, were not adequately notified in advance, tried to vote anyway and were turned away - simple as that.
It is not a lie. None of the witnesses that the USCCR heard from were prevented from voting because of the felon list. Allow me to quote from the dissenting statment:
Without question, some voters did encounter difficulties at the polls, but the evidence fails to support the claim of systematic disenfranchisement. Most of the complaints the Commission heard in direct testimony involved individuals who arrived at the polls on election day only to find that their names were not on the rolls of registered voters. The majority of these cases were due to bureaucratic errors, inefficiencies within the system, and/or error or confusion on the part of the voters themselves... The Commission did not hear from a single witness who was actually prevented from voting as a result of being erroneously identified as a felon.
Choicepoint is the firm that Katherine Harris, who simultaneously served in the Bush campaign and as head vote-counter in Florida (no other democracy allows that, by the way), used to come up with a felon list.
Wrong. Choicepoint was contracted to generate the list before Katherine Harris was in office. And they were hired by a woman named Ethel Baxter, who is a Democrat.
The list included thousands of blacks who weren't eligible to vote (at least 5,000).
Good. That was the goal- to identify the people that were ineligible. Like it or not, but Florida is one of a handful of states that do not allow convicted felons to vote. This felon list was generated to fulfull some of the requirements of a 1998 Florida statute passed by the legislature in response to problems with voter fraud during a 1996 mayoral election.
It was set up to disenfranchise everyone who had a similar name (even first initial and last name) as a felon.
The list was not "set up" to disenfranchise anybody. The Florida law that required the list was designed for an imperfect list. It clearly placed the burdon of verifying the names on the 67 individual county election supervisors. Oh, and white people were twice as likely as black people to be erroneously included in the list.
Considering that blacks voted 90-10 for Gore and that Bush only won the state (officially) by 537 votes, Bush owes his presidency to Choicepoint.
Bull crap. The USCCR was unable to identify a single voter that was incorrectly prevented from voting because of the felon list.
After all, this is the same company that put him in the White House in the first place. Or have you forgotten that he claims to have won by 500 votes while ChoicePoint helped disenfranchise thousands of primarily Democratic voters.
Bunk. ChoicePoint (actually, Database Technologies, which was later bought by ChoicePoint) was contracted to generate the felon list that was mandated by a new 1998 Florida law, and this law was designed to compensate for an imperfect list. It clearly placed the burdon of verifying the names on the individual county election supervisors, and over half of them didn't even use the list at all.
The end result? When the USCCR held hearings, they were unable to find a single person that was actually disenfranchised because of the felon list.
If somebody was wrongly identified as a felon and wrongly prevented from voting because of that (and this is a big "if"), the blame lies solely with the election supervisor of the county that he/she lives in.
I am not going to respond to everything to try to keep this from ballooning into a gigantic post, but I'll respond to some of your points.
Our involvement in that area was nothing more than an excuse to follow the rules of McArthiesm.
Why don't you ask the South Koreans if they feel the same? Or maybe they prefer scraping bark off of trees for dinner like their counterparts to the north?
Communism is a great theory, however no one yet has managed to implement it correctly.
That's about the same thing as saying "A perpetual motion engine is a great theory, just nobody has implemented it correctly yet." Sure- the ideas behind communism are great, but there is a reason why nobody has been able to implement it correctly (on a large scale, at least).
If we had kept our noses out of their business, perhaps there would be a few hundred thousand people enjoying life today.
Perhaps if we had ignored it, there would be hundreds of millions of people living under oppressive totalitarian regimes without basic freedom of speech or freedom of religion.
If we're out to take out dictatorships, why is Cuba still around? Putin has repealed most of the democratic reforms in Russia and implemented some highly questionable practices. Why aren't we marching our armies through Moscow?
We are not out to "take out" dictatorships- we are out to address threats to our security. This really isn't very hard to understand.
I don't know if you missed it, but the US invaded Iraq without the approval of the UN.
Wrong. The US invaded Iraq using the direct authorization for military force that was unanimously granted in resolution 687 and reaffirmed 16 times after that, including resolution 1441 that gave Saddam one final chance to comply.
You see a country that doesn't like you threaten and beat the shit out of another country and you expect them to NOT TO DEVELOPE DETERRENTS?!?
I expect countries to live up to their international obligations. North Korea has had a secret uranium enrichment program for the past decade in violation of both the NPT and our 1994 bilateral framework.
If Iran is also developing nuclear weapons, it is in violation of the NPT as well.
Now, I believe that our action in Iraq will help resolve these situations peacefully for several reasons: - The Shia majority in Iraq (led by Sistani) is very pro-democracy, and they are also friendly with Iran. This will have a big influence on the pro-democracy movements inside Iran. Just look at the number of reformist candidates that are running for President in Iran's July election to see this. There will be big changes in Iran this year! - Iran, Germany, France, and the UK are VERY motivated to succeed in their talks to resolve these issues. - North Korea is also motivated to resolve this crisis. Their comments this week were a transparent attempt to get back to bilateral talks with us because they feel this will give them legitimacy and prompt concessions and aid from us (like we gave them in 1994). The 6-party talks are the most likely way to resolve this peacefully.
Ah the Washinton Post. No that's an unbiased source of information right there.
What a weak-minded response. This was widely reported last summer (1, 2, 3, 4).
Are we talking about the same country? Even if they had plans, their infrastructure was so wrecked they were barely maintaining electricty and clean water.
All I can say is, read the ISG reports, because it is obvious that you haven't.
PLANS!= WMD. We have thousands of military plans to inva
The US has been responsible for more deaths, destruction and chaos since the 1950's than Saddam ever has.
Holy cow. It wasn't the US's fault that Kim-il-Sung invaded South Korea. It wasn't the US's fault that Ho Chi Minh encouraged an insurgency against South Vietnam to prime them for a communist takeover. It wasn't the US's fault that Saddam invaded Iran to start the third bloodiest war of the century. It wasn't the US's fault that Saddam then decided to "annex" Kuwait. It wasn't the US's fault that Saddam starved his own people during the 1990s just for propaganda.
We are not the bad guys here. Your anger is sorely misplaced.
We have WMD's.
Yes- in fact our status as one of the 5 nuclear states in the NPT mandates that we maintain WMDs so we can defend the non-nuclear states that are signatory to the NPT.
We disobey the UN fairly regularly.
No we don't. The actions we have taken in Afghanistan and Iraq were clearly authorized by the UN.
We destroyed two third world countries
My goodness. Do you seriously look at Afghanistan and Iraq and think that we destroyed them?
Iraq posed a significant threat to us. Whats more than that, Saddam was a big destabilizing force in a very volatile region. Our action in Iraq has not only eliminated one of the biggest threats to our national security, but it attacks the root of the problem by spreading freedom to the part of the world that is responsible for most of the terrorist threats that we face.
So instead of dealing with the real threats, we made up one and now after all the ash is falling we see not one but two "rogue" states with weapons that go boom.
What makes you think that we aren't dealing with these other threats? We tried diplomacy with Iraq for over 12 years. And our action in Iraq makes it more likely that diplomacy will succeed in Iran and the DPRK.
All this in the name of...what? Terrorism?Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and some very thick documents detail this quite explicitly.
Nobody claims that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. I hate to break this to you, but there are more terrorist threats to us than just al Qaeda. Iraq directly supported many terrorist organizations, and they had been caught plotting attacks against us several times throughout the 1990s. International intelligence indicated that they were still plotting against us. How long do you want to wait for this threat to materialize?
WMD? They didn't have them.
They did not have the WMD stockpiles that we thought, but they did have banned WMD programs and infrastructure. The ISG found over a dozen proscribed programs that the UN did not know about- any one of them was enough to justify military action.
Freeing an oppressed country?
Yes. A free and democratic Iraq will put enormous pressure on the governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria to reform, and will help stabilize the whole region.
I have never understood this fixation some people have with blaming all of the world's ills on the US. I believe that it is this pessimism and myopia that is preventing the Democrats from winning elections.
Blix's final report before the US told him to get out.
What? Have you even read that report? What Blix said was that Iraq has not come to a "genuine acceptance of the disarmament," and that the 12,000 page declaration they made in Dec 2002 "regrettably...does not seem to contain any new evidence that would eliminate the questions or reduce their number" about their compliance. Here is UNMOVIC's 175 page report of unresolved disarmament issues that they released that same month.
I mean final in the temporal sense rather than any spurious formal sense.
What in the world is that supposed to mean? They haven't issued a final report- period, and you look foolish trying to claim that they have.
Any reports that come out now are tainted by a political necessity for the UN to follow along with the US in order to avoid losing all semblance of control - and by months of US occupation wherein all sorts of "evidence" suddenly turns up, meager though it may be. I'm only interested in Blix's impressions at the time therefore. Not in your neocon-rewritten history.
In other words, you are only interested in "facts" that support your pre-conceived opinions.
In any event it would be no surprise and no foul if Sadaam had found a way to keep working on some weapons programs.
No foul? Again, I suggest you read the relevant resolutions, because it is clear that you haven't:
8. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:
(a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;
(b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;
... 10. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally undertake not to use, develop, construct or acquire any of the items specified in paragraphs 8 and 9 above
... 12. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally agree not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons-usable material or any subsystems or components or any research, development, support or manufacturing facilities related to the above;
... 32. Requires Iraq to inform the Security Council that it will not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate within its territory and to condemn unequivocally and renounce all acts, methods and practices of terrorism;
Just the US has ignored its own weapons treaty obligations in the past.
And just what weapons treaties has the US ignored? Are you referring to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States? Because #1- the other party to the treaty doesn't exist anymore, and #2- we didn't ignore our obligations, we followed the defined protocol to withdraw from the obsolete treaty
The point of these treaties and enforced resolutions was to slow Sadaam down enough to contain him, and they were working fine according to Blix's team.
Again, I refer you to Resolution 687, which plainly states that the goal of the resolutions was the "establishment in the Middle East of a zone free of [WMD]," and to "restore international peace and security." And Blix specifically said that Iraq was not in compliance with his obligations.
Israel was in violation of several UN resolutions and the US took no action against *them*
Regarding UN reports, this is disingenuous of you. The final reports from the UN inspection teams let by Hans Blix etc stated plainly that sanctions were working and there was no evidence of WMDs. Let me spell this out for you since you seem to find it hard to comprehend. The expert sent to determine whether there were any weapons on his final visit said that he had concluded there were none.
What the hell are you talking about? What final report? UNMOVIC hasn't issued a "final" report yet. They are supposed to release their first draft of a compendium if Iraq's proscribed weapons and programs next month (March 2005).
And UNMOVIC has not said that there is "no evidence" of WMDs. I think you are confusing some things here. They have said that there is no evidence that there were large WMD stockpiles left, but they can't rule out the possibility of smaller WMD caches spread across Iraq (including over 500 155mm artillery shells filled with high grade mustard gas that Saddam's Special Republican Guard is believed to have had as late as March 2003). This is all covered in their latest quarterly report.
And the stockpiles are only part of the story. We found dozens of proscribed WMD programs and activities in Iraq that the UN did not know about. All of these were direct violations of Iraq's cease-fire obligations that the Security Council had given explicit authorization to enforce using military action.
UNMOVIC addressed the ISG findings in their last quarterly report (November, 2004). In that report, they acknowledge that the ISG did in fact find proscribed weapons, programs, and procurement activities that the UN did not know about. Iraq was clearly in violation of Resolution 1441!
Your "charge sheet" bullet point list is not in dispute. He was an asshole dictator, just like numerous other asshole dictators around the world, many of them still supported by the US just like Saddam used to be.
Numerous others? Like who? Who else was in violation of 17 Chapter 7 Security Council Resolutions? Who else was under international orders to disarm? Who else had shown a willingness to use chemical weapons in the past, launched unprovoked missile attacks against neighboring countries, tried to illegally expand their borders, and had direct ties to numerous terrorist organizations? Sure- there are other bad people in this world, but you cannot seriously claim that Iraq did not pose a unique threat.
But you're suggesting that its reasonable and acceptable to go around invading sovereign nations on the off chance that they might possibly assist terrorists later on.
There was a lot more than just an "off chance" that Iraq would resort to terrorism- they already had multiple times! We foiled numerous terror plots against us or other western countries throughout the 1990s. And intelligence from around the world suggested that Iraq was still trying. Just how many "bloody noses" do you expect us to accept as a price of freedom?
Slashdot Mirror
They'll tell you it's too expensive to have printers on all the voting machines. (Even though Diebold is the same company that somehow figured out a way to give you a receipt for every transaction you make at an ATM.)
Um, no they don't. Diebold is selling a voting machine right now that offers a paper trail.
Even if he could have complied, and the invasion was was authorized, I would still oppose it, on moral grounds, rather than legal, so lets skip to the end... (I don't think either of us is going to convince the other of anything on those maters).
Moral? What in your mind is moral about allowing a murderous dictator promote terrorism, develop lethal weapons, torture and kill his own people, and defy the UN?
P.S. Have you thought about the military? Honestly? I considered it after 9/11. I Almost joined the marine reserves, but then I thought about it, and decided something like Iraq was likely, and changed plans.
Never really considered it.
Please tell me which part you think I am ignoring.
The security council threatened over a dozen times, it never approved use of force. There are good legal minds on both sides of this debate, but almost all of them on your side are American or British.
Ok- here is the authorization to use force in Resolution 678:
Then from Resolution 687:
I don't know how it could be more clear than that- the use of all necessary means was explicitly given to achieve the goals of 687, which were for Iraq to stop supporting terrorists and to get rid of all of their WMD programs.
This is what you are not hearing:
I never said they were in compliance! Show me where I did. I infact stated that their failure to comply was inevitable, due to the condiditons required for compliance. It is not a mater of moving goalposts. The problem is that the onus was on Saddam to prove he was WMD free. This is imposible to do.
And here is where you are not hearing me. The UN didn't just say to Saddam "Prove you don't have WMD". Instead, they they asked "What happened to the 331 tonnes of precursors for Tabun that you imported?" or "What happened to the 160 aerial bombs filled with Sarin agents that you declared to the UN". Every single subject in the Unresolved Disarmament Issues document ends with a bulleted list of actions that Iraq could take to help resolve the issue. These are clear and simple requests, such as "Provide the name and present location of the Air Force officer that wrote this document about Mustard Gas" or "Tell us why you had a 700,000 Dinar credit balance with foreign chemical suppliers in 1988". Failure to comply was not inevitable! Iraq was not in compliance because they chose not to be.
Violation of a resolution doesn't mean a severe threat.
The UN Security Council unanimously passed those resolutions precisely because Iraq posed a threat.
There are a lot of counties with WMD, Iraq didn't have signifigant amounts (yeah, they could have begun making it again... so could anyone).
Other countries were not under international orders to disarm their WMD.
Our allies also told us he was buying yellow cake in Africa. Inteligence is a highly foulable art form, forgive me for being sceptical.
Allies told us he was seeking uranium in Africa, and this has been confirmed by multiple sources.
As for how long to wait. I don't think it is morally OK to attack anyone because of their ability to attack. In short, I don't think preventive warfare is OK. If it is OK to attack a nation because it has the ability to attack you, and even a demonstrated willingness to attack others, think of what that means if the shoe is on the other foot. Iran and North Korea are justified in attacking the US by the moral standard we hold ourselves to.
That said, if an attack is eminent, war is no longer preventative, and is thus justifiable. So to use the Pearl Harbor analogy. If we had intel that said an attack on Pearl was coming soon. I would wait until there was a wave of bombers in the air coming toward Pearl, then scramble intercepters.
Ok- so when is an attack imminent? At what point did th
Well, Kofi Annan made a comment a while back that he thought it was illegal, and he got such a strong reaction that he hasn't repeated that claim since- even when directly asked.
But Boutros Boutros-Ghali has never claimed that. On the contrary, he has publicly spoken many times about the authorization implicit in resolutions 678 and 687. For example, after the US, UK, and France attacked some Iraqi sites in 1993, he saidThis is the exact same justification that we had to invade Iraq in 2003, and his answer is just as applicable today. This is also the position of the government of the US, UK, Italy, Australia, Spain, Poland, and many others.
Compliance on WMD is imposible to satisfy, that was the subject of most of my argument.
No- it wasn't. Resolution 1284 that was passed back in 1999 addressed this problem by requiring the creation of the "key disarmament tasks" document. According to 1284, this document detailed what was required of Iraq to bring them into compliance and to avoid any "moving of the goalposts" with regard to their disarmament responsibilities. This document was delivered to Iraq in 1999. A follow up of this document was prepared by UNMOVIC and delivered in 2003. I have already linked to both of these documents in this thread. Compliance was very clearly defined for Iraq; they just chose to not do it. The ISG confirmed this when they discovered dozens of illegal weapons programs in Iraq that the UN did not know about. So, yeah, I guess compliance on WMD was impossible for Iraq to satisfy because they were still trying to develop illegal weapons.
Does the charter not state that war should not be waged without the approval of the security counsel? (Don't try to agrue that it was a legal war becasue we were enforcing the resolutions of an organisation whose laws say that our acts of enforcement were illegal, there is just too much cognitive dissonance there)
Wow- talk about cognitive dissonance. The Security Council did approve of military action over a dozen times.
Honestly it has been a while since I read 687... You are going to have to refresh my memory as to how it is concretecompliance is possible. If I recall correctly that is one of them that calls on Iraq to prove it is free of weapons by allowing inspections. Well, the inspectors didn't find anything (significant) and yet many were convinced that Iraq had banned weapons.
Iraq was ordered to unconditionally accept under international supervision the destruction of all of their WMDs and all related subsystems and components, research, and manufacturing facilities. This was not a detective work- Saddam was required to bring us to his weapons sites and let us watch him destroy them. He never did. Here is a chronology of events during the 1990's to see what he did instead. Iraq was NOT in compliance with the UN mandate, which was confirmed by the 1200 page ISG report.
So how exactly is it possible to prove that you don't have something when the accuser can simply claim that you must be hidding it?
Once again, I refer you to the documents that UNSCOM and UNMOVIC sent to Iraq which clearly detailed what Iraq needed to do to satisfy the commissions. Iraq was supposed to be an active participant, but instead they blatantly lied to and obstructed the inspectors for 12 years.
SOA has gone alot further than having graduates that became criminals. SOA explicitly trained people in the use of guerilla tactics against populations to inspire fear as a means to influence elections.
I would love to know where you got this "information" about the operation of a secret training facility.
Some of this is true, some is almost hyperbolically exadgerated. But I will say that if I were in charge of national security, I would go through this process:
1. Gather information
We did this for over 12 years.
2. Identify threats
3. Prioritize threats
Who else in the world was in defiance of over a dozen unanimous Chapter VII Security Council resolutions? Who else had illegal WMD capabilities and had shown a willingness to use these weapons in the past? Who else had supported dozens of terrorist organizations for 25 years and had tried to direct terrorist attacks against us multiple times over the past decade? Sure, there are other threats, but Saddam was pretty high up on that list.
4. Determine what action has the best likelyhood of positive results
Seeding democracy in the Middle East has a huge likelihood of long term positive results.
5. Determine if the likely results of that action are better than the likely results of inaction
The ISG reported that Iraq had the supplies, procurement systems, and infrastructure in place to go to full scale mustard gas production within 2 months. Our allies warned us that Saddam was plotting more terrorist attacks against us- how long would you have liked to wait?
6. Act (if applicable under step 5)
And I am glad we did.
What are you talking about? We voted for at least a half a dozen UN resolutions condemning Iraq for it's chemical weapon use in the 1980s (see resolutions 540, 582, 588, 598, 612, and 620). It was because of his use of chemical weapons that we worked to get resolution 687 passed which required Iraq to completely disarm ALL of its WMD and WMD programs. You've got a strange definition of "backing".
We are in violation of the freakin' charter!
Why? Because TamMan2000 says so? You are going to have to do better than that.
There was nothing illegal or against the UN charter with our 2003 invasion of Iraq. On the contrary, the UN charter mandates that member states enforce Chapter VII resolutions, which we did.
And the fact that we have a security counsel veto is the only thing that has kept chapter VII resolutions off our ass. That and the fact that nobody wants to try to enforce one on the sole remaining super power, Iraq is easy to pick on, the US, not so much...
In addition to that, many of the 17 resolutions Iraq was in violation of were written specifically so that compliance was either impossible or subjective (cheezedawg, you have WMD, prove otherwise), in other words they were written so that their garaunteed violation could be political capital.
That is baloney. Have you read resolution 687 or any of the subsequent resolutions? How about this 1999 letter that UNSCOM gave Iraq about how to satisfy the commission. Or the 175 page Unresolved Disarmament Issues document that UNMOVIC delivered to Iraq in 2003. Iraq's requirements to resolve these issues were very clearly communicated to them- they just ignored them.
Does the phrase Salvadoran death-squad mean any thing to you? How about School of the Americas?
Are you unaware of these, or are these not considered supporting terrorism to achieve our goals in your book?
No, I don't consider the SOA as supporting terrorism, because there is no evidence that they do. Sure, some people affiliated with it later turned out to be criminals, but if this is your standard, then places like the Univ of Michigan, UCLA, Wichita State, and pretty much any institution in the world "support" terrorism.
The use of force was threatened, and the demands went unheaded, but the resolution to back up the threat was never passed, correct?
The authorization to use military force was given in resolution 678. You should read it sometime.
Besides, you are dodging the real issue on this question. I did not say Iraq was not a threat. I said everyone is a threat. The point is that if you set out to prove that any group is a threat, and you have a decent spin/research staff, you will suceed. Of course Iraq was found to be a threat, it is a forgone conclusion...
No, you are dodging the issue. Iraq was a country that in the recent past had illegally tried to expand its borders (twice), launched unprovoked missile attacks on 3 of its neighbors, used chemical weapons against its own people and against Iran, was in open defiance of international orders to disarm, directly supported dozens of terrorist organizations, had tried to direct terrorist attacks against the United States multiple times, and was trying to plan even more attacks against us up until the invasion. If you can't see this as a unique threat, then I am glad that you are not in charge of our national security.
In addition to this threat, there were a number of strategic goals of the invasion, with countering the hate and oppression in the area with freedom and democracy at the top of that list. For lots of reasons, Iraq was the best place to start with these goals. It isn't perfect, but war never is.
Are you aware that the United States is in violation of UN mandate?
Chapter VII resolutions are the only UN resolutions that are enforceable in any context. The United States has never been the subject of a Chapter VII resolution. Iraq, on the other hand, was in violation of 17 of them. Try to keep your comparisons on topic.
Are you aware that the United States has recently supported (perhaps currently supporting) terrorists?
It has never been US policy to support terrorism or use terrorism to achieve its goals. Your moral equivalence is crap.
Did you know that to some degree, every nation on the face of the earth is a threat to every other nation's national security?
The UN security council sat down 17 times and unanimously decided that Iraq's weapons were a threat to international peace and security, and they specifically authorized the use of military force to disarm them of those weapons. This is not some story that President Bush cooked up to justify an invasion- this is documented history. Why are you trying to downplay that?
They may very well be true. They are also completely besides the point.
I beg to differ. That is exactly the point, and has been since day one.
Weapons of Mass destruction was the original justification for going to war.
Saddam's illegal WMD programs were only part of the justification, and considering what the ISG and UNMOVIC have found in Iraq since the invasion, it was a pretty solid justification. True, we didn't find the decade old decaying stockpiles that we thought we were going to find, but instead we found programs and infrastructure that prompted David Kay to say that Iraq was even a greater threat than we thought they were when we invaded.
Hell our closest allies even flat out admit Bush was bent on military action before anything else. (Downing Street Memos...heard of them perhaps?)
The Downing Street memos are not an admission of anything. One ambiguous use of the word "fixed" by somebody who isn't even in a position to speak for US intelligence is not as damning as you seem to believe- especially considering Blair and Straw have strongly denounced your interpretation.
Do you seriously think there are fewer terrorists in Iraq now than there were before we invaded?
Who knows? Not me, and certainly not you. We are killing a lot of terrorists in Iraq. Are we killing more than are being created by us being there? Hopefully, but only time will tell.
Iran supports terrorists...we aren't invading them...how come?
Like we did with Iraq, we are first exhausting other options with Iran before turning to military action.
North Korea is arguably as much as or more of a threat than Saddam was under sanctions. But we don't invade them...how come?
First of all, I don't think any body argues that the DPRK posed more of a threat than Saddam. But that is irrelevant- pointing out that other threats exist does not negate the fact that Iraq posed a threat. North Korea is a VERY different situation than Iraq. Kim Jong Il is a desperate and egotistical leader that is probably only looking for international aid and recognition. The biggest threat he poses is that he might share technologies with groups of people that, unlike him, would actually use it against us. The 6-party talks have resumed and are progressing nicely this week, and there is no reason to believe that they will fail.
On the other hand, if you said that Iraq was in violation of its UN mandated disarmament requirements, that Iraq was supporting terrorists, and that Iraq posed a threat to our national security, those were not lies because they are all true.
Before we officially learned it was Karl Rove
I'm going to stop you right there. We haven't officially learned ANYTHING- we don't even know if a crime was committed in the first place. Rove learned about Plame from other journalists, so if there was a "leak", it happened before Rove was even involved.
But all of the available evidence points to the fact that there wasn't a leak of confidential information at all. Wilson himself says that his wife was not a covert operative at the time of Novak's article, and it was apparently common knowledge in her neighborhood that Plame worked for the CIA. The reporters that told Rove about Plame could have got the information from anywhere.
The fact that Wilson's wife did work for the CIA, and even more, that she was the one that recommended him for the trip to Niger (not the Vice President like Wilson claimed), is very relevent to the story because it proves Wilson lied about his trip. It is already known that he lied about his trip findings, and now the very genesis of the trip was a lie as well.
Uh, this is kind of fundamental to our justice system. The grand jury is investigating whether or not a crime was committed. If they determine that there is enough evidence that a crime was committed, then they may issue some indictments, and we may see a trial. None of this implies guilt.
Another example of AMD trying to win in the marketplace through whining. There is nothing preventing AMD from releasing their own compiler. Instead they are just bitching about Intel again.
Intel doesn't come close to a monopoly in the compiler market, so I fail to see what this has to do with the antitrust suit.
330lbs sounds like a lot, but its probably about the size of a 12 pack of coke.
If you disagree with the parent, be a man and argue the point with him. Don't mod him as 'flamebait' merely because what he says makes you feel uncomfortable.
You are right- don't mark his post as flamebait because you ar uncomfortable- instead mod him as flamebait because he is WRONG. Diebold does market electronic voting systems that have a paper trail. That kinda deflates your conspiracy theories, doesnt it?
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Fascinating. You seem to be simultaneously arguing against the 2-party system and the multi-party system. According to the requirements in your post, a single party system would be the "best".
The fact is the two-party system is one of the greatest strengths of the United States. It forces compromise, and guarantees the largest proportion of the populated will be represented. It also provides stability because it makes it impossible for a radical leader to come to power. That is why we end up with Presidents like Bill Clinton and George W Bush instead of Hitler. If you take away the two party system, you take away one of the things that makes this country great.
The US violated international law by invading and occupying Iraq, and you want to talk about doing things by the (that is, your) book?
International law does not mean "everything UnrefinedLayman agrees with." There was nothing "illegal" about our invasion of Iraq. The UN Security Council gave explicit authorization in resolution 678 to use military force to enforce the cease-fire demands of resolution 687. This authorization was confirmed over a dozen times in the decade that followed, including resolution 1441 that gave Iraq one final chance to comply.
And how many of these people on the list were actually prevented from voting? The answer is that we don't know, but the USCCR wasn't able to find a single person that was.
Greg Palast is so twisted up in hate that he can't see straight. His conclusions are not supported by any of the data he presents. Yet, people are so eager to hate President Bush that they are willing to accept his fluff at face value. Its sad, really.
When the fraud was officially investigated, ChoicePoint admitted to a false-positive rate of up to 15%, which was already far in excess of Bush's lead in the Florida poll. Later, an independent investigation showed an error rate of more than 90% - some 55,000 voters, some 30,000 of whom were black.
What you seem to be missing here is that a false positive on the felon list does not mean that person was disenfranchised. Instead it meant that the election supervisor of the county that the individual lived in was required to verify that they were eligible to vote (that is, if the county used the felon list at all- over half of the counties ignored the list completely). You see, the list was designed to have false positives. As Katherine Harris said, it was supposed to cast a wide net to find ineligible voters that were registered to vote. In other words, if somebody was disenfranchised, it is the County Election Supervisor's fault.
So please stop calling it "fraud". There was no fraud here.
This is a flat-out lie. Read some first-hand accounts of voter disenfranchisement for yourselves. Voters were erroneously scrubbed from the electoral roll, were not adequately notified in advance, tried to vote anyway and were turned away - simple as that.
It is not a lie. None of the witnesses that the USCCR heard from were prevented from voting because of the felon list. Allow me to quote from the dissenting statment:
Choicepoint is the firm that Katherine Harris, who simultaneously served in the Bush campaign and as head vote-counter in Florida (no other democracy allows that, by the way), used to come up with a felon list.
Wrong. Choicepoint was contracted to generate the list before Katherine Harris was in office. And they were hired by a woman named Ethel Baxter, who is a Democrat.
The list included thousands of blacks who weren't eligible to vote (at least 5,000).
Good. That was the goal- to identify the people that were ineligible. Like it or not, but Florida is one of a handful of states that do not allow convicted felons to vote. This felon list was generated to fulfull some of the requirements of a 1998 Florida statute passed by the legislature in response to problems with voter fraud during a 1996 mayoral election.
It was set up to disenfranchise everyone who had a similar name (even first initial and last name) as a felon.
The list was not "set up" to disenfranchise anybody. The Florida law that required the list was designed for an imperfect list. It clearly placed the burdon of verifying the names on the 67 individual county election supervisors. Oh, and white people were twice as likely as black people to be erroneously included in the list.
Considering that blacks voted 90-10 for Gore and that Bush only won the state (officially) by 537 votes, Bush owes his presidency to Choicepoint.
Bull crap. The USCCR was unable to identify a single voter that was incorrectly prevented from voting because of the felon list.
After all, this is the same company that put him in the White House in the first place. Or have you forgotten that he claims to have won by 500 votes while ChoicePoint helped disenfranchise thousands of primarily Democratic voters.
Bunk. ChoicePoint (actually, Database Technologies, which was later bought by ChoicePoint) was contracted to generate the felon list that was mandated by a new 1998 Florida law, and this law was designed to compensate for an imperfect list. It clearly placed the burdon of verifying the names on the individual county election supervisors, and over half of them didn't even use the list at all.
The end result? When the USCCR held hearings, they were unable to find a single person that was actually disenfranchised because of the felon list.
If somebody was wrongly identified as a felon and wrongly prevented from voting because of that (and this is a big "if"), the blame lies solely with the election supervisor of the county that he/she lives in.
I am not going to respond to everything to try to keep this from ballooning into a gigantic post, but I'll respond to some of your points.
Our involvement in that area was nothing more than an excuse to follow the rules of McArthiesm.
Why don't you ask the South Koreans if they feel the same? Or maybe they prefer scraping bark off of trees for dinner like their counterparts to the north?
Communism is a great theory, however no one yet has managed to implement it correctly.
That's about the same thing as saying "A perpetual motion engine is a great theory, just nobody has implemented it correctly yet." Sure- the ideas behind communism are great, but there is a reason why nobody has been able to implement it correctly (on a large scale, at least).
If we had kept our noses out of their business, perhaps there would be a few hundred thousand people enjoying life today.
Perhaps if we had ignored it, there would be hundreds of millions of people living under oppressive totalitarian regimes without basic freedom of speech or freedom of religion.
If we're out to take out dictatorships, why is Cuba still around? Putin has repealed most of the democratic reforms in Russia and implemented some highly questionable practices. Why aren't we marching our armies through Moscow?
We are not out to "take out" dictatorships- we are out to address threats to our security. This really isn't very hard to understand.
I don't know if you missed it, but the US invaded Iraq without the approval of the UN.
Wrong. The US invaded Iraq using the direct authorization for military force that was unanimously granted in resolution 687 and reaffirmed 16 times after that, including resolution 1441 that gave Saddam one final chance to comply.
You see a country that doesn't like you threaten and beat the shit out of another country and you expect them to NOT TO DEVELOPE DETERRENTS?!?
I expect countries to live up to their international obligations. North Korea has had a secret uranium enrichment program for the past decade in violation of both the NPT and our 1994 bilateral framework.
If Iran is also developing nuclear weapons, it is in violation of the NPT as well.
Now, I believe that our action in Iraq will help resolve these situations peacefully for several reasons:
- The Shia majority in Iraq (led by Sistani) is very pro-democracy, and they are also friendly with Iran. This will have a big influence on the pro-democracy movements inside Iran. Just look at the number of reformist candidates that are running for President in Iran's July election to see this. There will be big changes in Iran this year!
- Iran, Germany, France, and the UK are VERY motivated to succeed in their talks to resolve these issues.
- North Korea is also motivated to resolve this crisis. Their comments this week were a transparent attempt to get back to bilateral talks with us because they feel this will give them legitimacy and prompt concessions and aid from us (like we gave them in 1994). The 6-party talks are the most likely way to resolve this peacefully.
Ah the Washinton Post. No that's an unbiased source of information right there.
What a weak-minded response. This was widely reported last summer (1, 2, 3, 4).
Are we talking about the same country? Even if they had plans, their infrastructure was so wrecked they were barely maintaining electricty and clean water.
All I can say is, read the ISG reports, because it is obvious that you haven't.
PLANS!= WMD. We have thousands of military plans to inva
The US has been responsible for more deaths, destruction and chaos since the 1950's than Saddam ever has.
Holy cow. It wasn't the US's fault that Kim-il-Sung invaded South Korea. It wasn't the US's fault that Ho Chi Minh encouraged an insurgency against South Vietnam to prime them for a communist takeover. It wasn't the US's fault that Saddam invaded Iran to start the third bloodiest war of the century. It wasn't the US's fault that Saddam then decided to "annex" Kuwait. It wasn't the US's fault that Saddam starved his own people during the 1990s just for propaganda.
We are not the bad guys here. Your anger is sorely misplaced.
We have WMD's.
Yes- in fact our status as one of the 5 nuclear states in the NPT mandates that we maintain WMDs so we can defend the non-nuclear states that are signatory to the NPT.
We disobey the UN fairly regularly.
No we don't. The actions we have taken in Afghanistan and Iraq were clearly authorized by the UN.
We destroyed two third world countries
My goodness. Do you seriously look at Afghanistan and Iraq and think that we destroyed them?
Iraq posed a significant threat to us. Whats more than that, Saddam was a big destabilizing force in a very volatile region. Our action in Iraq has not only eliminated one of the biggest threats to our national security, but it attacks the root of the problem by spreading freedom to the part of the world that is responsible for most of the terrorist threats that we face.
So instead of dealing with the real threats, we made up one and now after all the ash is falling we see not one but two "rogue" states with weapons that go boom.
What makes you think that we aren't dealing with these other threats? We tried diplomacy with Iraq for over 12 years. And our action in Iraq makes it more likely that diplomacy will succeed in Iran and the DPRK.
All this in the name of...what? Terrorism?Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and some very thick documents detail this quite explicitly.
Nobody claims that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. I hate to break this to you, but there are more terrorist threats to us than just al Qaeda. Iraq directly supported many terrorist organizations, and they had been caught plotting attacks against us several times throughout the 1990s. International intelligence indicated that they were still plotting against us. How long do you want to wait for this threat to materialize?
WMD? They didn't have them.
They did not have the WMD stockpiles that we thought, but they did have banned WMD programs and infrastructure. The ISG found over a dozen proscribed programs that the UN did not know about- any one of them was enough to justify military action.
Freeing an oppressed country?
Yes. A free and democratic Iraq will put enormous pressure on the governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria to reform, and will help stabilize the whole region.
I have never understood this fixation some people have with blaming all of the world's ills on the US. I believe that it is this pessimism and myopia that is preventing the Democrats from winning elections.
What? Have you even read that report? What Blix said was that Iraq has not come to a "genuine acceptance of the disarmament," and that the 12,000 page declaration they made in Dec 2002 "regrettably...does not seem to contain any new evidence that would eliminate the questions or reduce their number" about their compliance. Here is UNMOVIC's 175 page report of unresolved disarmament issues that they released that same month.
I mean final in the temporal sense rather than any spurious formal sense.
What in the world is that supposed to mean? They haven't issued a final report- period, and you look foolish trying to claim that they have.
Any reports that come out now are tainted by a political necessity for the UN to follow along with the US in order to avoid losing all semblance of control - and by months of US occupation wherein all sorts of "evidence" suddenly turns up, meager though it may be. I'm only interested in Blix's impressions at the time therefore. Not in your neocon-rewritten history.
In other words, you are only interested in "facts" that support your pre-conceived opinions.
In any event it would be no surprise and no foul if Sadaam had found a way to keep working on some weapons programs.
No foul? Again, I suggest you read the relevant resolutions, because it is clear that you haven't:
Just the US has ignored its own weapons treaty obligations in the past.
And just what weapons treaties has the US ignored? Are you referring to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States? Because
#1- the other party to the treaty doesn't exist anymore, and
#2- we didn't ignore our obligations, we followed the defined protocol to withdraw from the obsolete treaty
The point of these treaties and enforced resolutions was to slow Sadaam down enough to contain him, and they were working fine according to Blix's team.
Again, I refer you to Resolution 687, which plainly states that the goal of the resolutions was the "establishment in the Middle East of a zone free of [WMD]," and to "restore international peace and security." And Blix specifically said that Iraq was not in compliance with his obligations.
Israel was in violation of several UN resolutions and the US took no action against *them*
I specifically said Chapter 7 UN Securit
Regarding UN reports, this is disingenuous of you. The final reports from the UN inspection teams let by Hans Blix etc stated plainly that sanctions were working and there was no evidence of WMDs. Let me spell this out for you since you seem to find it hard to comprehend. The expert sent to determine whether there were any weapons on his final visit said that he had concluded there were none.
What the hell are you talking about? What final report? UNMOVIC hasn't issued a "final" report yet. They are supposed to release their first draft of a compendium if Iraq's proscribed weapons and programs next month (March 2005).
And UNMOVIC has not said that there is "no evidence" of WMDs. I think you are confusing some things here. They have said that there is no evidence that there were large WMD stockpiles left, but they can't rule out the possibility of smaller WMD caches spread across Iraq (including over 500 155mm artillery shells filled with high grade mustard gas that Saddam's Special Republican Guard is believed to have had as late as March 2003). This is all covered in their latest quarterly report.
And the stockpiles are only part of the story. We found dozens of proscribed WMD programs and activities in Iraq that the UN did not know about. All of these were direct violations of Iraq's cease-fire obligations that the Security Council had given explicit authorization to enforce using military action.
UNMOVIC addressed the ISG findings in their last quarterly report (November, 2004). In that report, they acknowledge that the ISG did in fact find proscribed weapons, programs, and procurement activities that the UN did not know about. Iraq was clearly in violation of Resolution 1441!
Your "charge sheet" bullet point list is not in dispute. He was an asshole dictator, just like numerous other asshole dictators around the world, many of them still supported by the US just like Saddam used to be.
Numerous others? Like who? Who else was in violation of 17 Chapter 7 Security Council Resolutions? Who else was under international orders to disarm? Who else had shown a willingness to use chemical weapons in the past, launched unprovoked missile attacks against neighboring countries, tried to illegally expand their borders, and had direct ties to numerous terrorist organizations? Sure- there are other bad people in this world, but you cannot seriously claim that Iraq did not pose a unique threat.
But you're suggesting that its reasonable and acceptable to go around invading sovereign nations on the off chance that they might possibly assist terrorists later on.
There was a lot more than just an "off chance" that Iraq would resort to terrorism- they already had multiple times! We foiled numerous terror plots against us or other western countries throughout the 1990s. And intelligence from around the world suggested that Iraq was still trying. Just how many "bloody noses" do you expect us to accept as a price of freedom?