No comment

For those of us that remain unenlightened and are, apparently, not intelligent enough to comprehend the meaning of your stunned silence, would you be so kind as to explain why this isn’t a reasonable question to ask?

Yes, and it stands to reason that interviewed Iraqi scientists would be completely forthright and open with their questioners under such circumstances.

That’s a poorly phrased question.

But remember that Saddam wasn’t all cooperation; even after letting the the inspectors in, he stalled and stonewalled and obstructed for the longest time possible, and made little, incremental concessions one at a time. That was well in keeping with past form, and I suspect (as did many others) that the incemental cooperation would have ceased as soon as the US military stood down and went home.

Also, he didn’t account for what became of the weapons that had existed in the past (which remain unaccounted for).

So perhaps the question should be “Why did Saddam keep playing the same game he had played in 1995-98, when an invasion was obviously imminent?”

But, but …(lapses into stunned silence)

But, but …(lapses into stunned silence)

That’s great: “avoid the 1991 war.” You mean avoid it by not starting it by invading Kuwait?

So was the US supposed to keep 300,000 servicepeople on the Kuwait border for ever?

This is my first time on this site, it was recommened, and I must say I am very surprised with the quality of the comments on this issue.

Think over the question posed and then put yourself in Saddam’s position. Then some of you may see why full compliance was never going to occur.

If you can’t understand his and Iraq’s reluctance to completely open the country to foreign inspection, you fail utterly to understand foreign policy, history and politics.

Was Saddam going to fully cooperate with inspections and disarmament? Possibly not. But that’s not because of some rule that totalitarian dictators never do – Ukraine has a nasty government, so did South Africa, and so does Libya. All of these countries did exactly what you’re saying Saddam would never do.

I’ll agree that Saddam probably didn’t intend to provoke an invasion, but nonetheless that’s exactly what he did. And at some point, it’s not our responsibility to ensure that we’ve gotten through to someone who is obviously out of touch with reality. I mean – he thought he was going to *win* Desert Storm.

“As regards 2002-03 it would be betterphrased as follows: if Saddam had no “WMD”, why were the inspectors unable to give Iraq a clean bill of health?”

Posted by james · February 6, 2004

For the obvious reason, James.
It’s frequently hard to prove a negative.

IIRC, Blix’s testimony to the UN was to the efffect that Saddam was cooperating (there might have been instances of lack of cooperating, but no practical problems). Also that there was no evidence of WMD’s found. Also that US intelligence furnished to the UN team was 100% worthless.

All in all, Blix’s testimony was far, far more accurate than Colin Powell’s.

And it’s especially hard to prove a negative if you only have 48 hours to leave the country before the bombs start falling.

Bruce, I never said to send the tanks home. What’s wrong with leaving them to idle on the border for a few months? That’s still bound to be a lot cheaper than what it cost to actually use them.

Oh, I see. So you let them play games until you spend a billion dollars to ship the marines in. Then, when they realize you are serious and stop playing games (more or less) you decide you’re already there, and it’s getting on lunchtime, so might as well go ahead and send them in and spend another $200 billion.

Wait, I’m still confused.

(And if the Bush’s cabal never intended to have the troops wait around to see if the inspections would work, then why did they say things to the effect of “pursuing all diplomatic options, etc. Nevermind, I know the answer.)

Remember that Saddam claimed that his government had destroyed BOTH the stockpiles of banned weapons which they had previously admitted having, AND the records of the destruction, even though producing such records at any time would have been a very strong argument for the relaxation of crippling sanctions. Now that this appears to have been a true claim, I am still at quite a loss to come up with a good motive for doing such a crazy thing. He appears to have gambled that letting other states in the region think he still had the banned weapons was worth the risk of war with the US, and imagined that if pushed to the wall he could convince the US that the weapons were destroyed. This turned out to be a bad bet. Did anyone really find this claim plausible at the time?

jack lecou is a funny guy. Apparently the purpose of the U.S. Army is to sit on the borders of countries who are playing games with inspectors, but never to actually do anything, since that would be too expensive. We can call this the “Memento Doctrine”, since it depends on all dictators having the same brain damage that affected the Guy Pearce character in that movie. (He couldn’t remember anything that happened more than fifteen or so minutes previously; for jack’s idea to work, dictators have to forget every 15 minutes that, no matter how scary and cooperation-inducing those Marines on the border may be, they have no chance of actually doing anything, since jack is running the foreign policy.)

Of course, in that movie, Leonard (the Guy Pearce character) figured out ways to remind himself of things, such as tattooing very important stuff on his chest. I can just visualize Saddam tattooing “DON’T WORRY, THEY’RE JUST THERE FOR SHOW — THEY WON’T ACTUALLY REMOVE YOU” on his chest.

If Mr. John Q. was just trying to set a bunch of you guys up, and let a group of seemingly educated and informed people make obviously incorrect and easily disproved statements, then he succeeded.

I don’t think that was his goal, though. I think he thought that most people were a little better informed on the facts than this.

But it is a testament to the power of a simple message, repeated over and over, even in the face of contradictory info.

I doubt the efficacy of commenting, because the goalposts are constantly being moved to discussions of rape rooms, or UN ineffectiveness, or philosophical explorations of what it is to “know” something, but…

…”since Hussein certainly didn’t let his scientists be interviewed outside the country, and didn’t let inspectors rummage through his palaces”…

“remember that Saddam wasn’t all cooperation; even after letting the the inspectors in, he stalled and stonewalled and obstructed for the longest time possible”

“A guy who allows his sons to pick women to rape and murder certainly can’t be expected to allow the UN to come in and actually look around.”

Here’s Hans:

“The inspections have taken place throughout Iraq at industrial sites, ammunition depots, research centers, universities, presidential sites, mobile laboratories, private houses, missile production facilities, military camps and agricultural sites”

“The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has been prompt”

“we note that access to sites has so far been without problems, including those that have never been declared or inspected as well as two presidential sites and private residences.”

Nu’uh is not an argument.

This doesn’t mean that there weren’t still outstanding disarmament issues (unaccounted for chem. stockpiles from before 1991, and interviews). The Iraqis said they would allow all requested interviews, but the interviewees were balking. They all wanted to be able to record them, or to do it in the presence of the Iraqi minders. Could mean Saddam wasn’t allowing them, or it might mean the scientists were scared poopless.

Here’s a different tact: Everyone who confidently asserts that Saddam wasn’t complying (Blix said he was on process, not on substance) I’d ask, what wasn’t he doing?

There were tons of late 80’s VX gas unaccounted for. Iraq said they destroyed it, provided a list of 80 witnesses to the destruction. Chemical analysis of the soil at the site was inconclusive. There’s no telling.

But what else?

Saddam wasn’t bluffing (obstructing even though he had nothing). He claimed to have no weapons. He was basically telling the truth, it turns out.

Saddam sent Lebanese emmisaries to negotiate with Bush prior to the war, and Bush refused to meet with them. This was reported a couple months ago, but has disappeared from the discussion. This fact, along with the limited willingness of Saddam to allow U.N. inspections, suggests that military action was not necessary. Even if it was expensive to ship troops to Iraq and mass them on the border, it was much cheaper in blood and treasure to let them wait that to invade and have to pick up the pieces.

Barry,

But from the viewpoint of the inspectors and indeed that of Resolution 1441 which sent them back in it wasn’t a matter of proving a negative i.e. that Iraq had a “clean bill of health” as regards WMD. It was a case of accounting for WMD which had supposedly been previously established to exist by previous inspectors. Therefore contrasting analogy was often made with South Africa who decided to give up its nuke program and had this verified.

In Blix’s reports he made frequent reference to the thousands of litres of anthrax etc. which were “unaccounted for”. To his great credit he always stressed that the failure of Iraq to account for these stocks didn’t mean they actually still existed – a distinction whose importance is now abundantly obvious. (Incidentally I wholly agree that Blix was more credible than Powell – unsurprising since the latter was making a case for war, whereas Blix was just doing a professional job in very difficult circumstances).

Mind you, as I understand it those stockpiles would have been wholly useless anyway because they would have degraded so much since they were produced.

It is to say that the conditions placed on Iraq seem, in retrospect, calculated to back Saddam into a corner.

In retrospect? I was saying it at the time, no hindsight necessary.

What’s more, the reason I ultimately ending up supporting the war (in the last two weeks or so before the actual invasion) was that Bush had carefully backed the US into a corner, too; after banging our drums so loudly, we had to follow through with an invasion lest we lose all credibility with other despotic regimes.

It really was the world’s most psychotic game of Chicken.

He appears to have gambled that letting other states in the region think he still had the banned weapons was worth the risk of war with the US, and imagined that if pushed to the wall he could convince the US that the weapons were destroyed. This turned out to be a bad bet. Did anyone really find this claim plausible at the time?

Am I the only one who remembers hearing Blix, after the war got rolling, on NPR talking about how he was sure the US would find WMD and that if he had only been given more time, he would have found them too?

Or the fact that the Greens in Germany were on the ropes because they had been outed for lying about intelligence that was conclusive for the existance of WMDs? No one has discussed that the big winner in the entire “no WMDs” is the German Green government that was about to collapse under the weight of frauds it had committed and has been saved by discovering that the lies it told were true after all.

I’d note that Saddam had 500k troops in defense on rough terrain. Typically, defense gives you a force modifier of x3 and rough terrain of x2. For a successful invasion under normal analysis, Saddam could feel certain that the U.S. would need about three million combat troops on the ground.

Of course there were issues of troop quality, of weather (and when the U.S. could launch a war, there was a narrowing window) and his desire to have people believe that he actually had WMDs and to keep WMD programs going, no matter how circumscribed.

I’ll note that for the most part a WMD program is not worth the cost. If he had just had a LAW (light anti-tank weapon) program he would have destabilized the region much more. Imagine Hamas with LAWs instead of morters and rockets. LAW snipers instead of suicide bombers.

Of course he had a failure of strategic planning as well as everything else …

Ms. Clinton is probably still kicking herself over the interview she gave when everyone still thought WMDs would be found. Yes, it helped sell her book, but if she had just waited six months she could have been on the side of all the posters here who feel that it was obvious there were no WMDs. Of course the Clintons did not have access to the quality of intelligence that Bush used.

And Pigs fly. Do you really believe that the Clintons had less of the truth that Bush? Or that Bush the younger mislead them?

Sigh.

Or that the CIA’s track record was so good that this time they had the guts to believe they were right when they had been wrong so many times before?

Anyway, I hope the leader of the free press movement in Egypt was right when he spoke this week on NPR on how he invasion of Iraq was such a good thing. (Yes, you get much better perspectives on NPR than in the right wing press, especially the shock from the interviewers).

Of course he is just an Egyptian and an Arabist. Not a good ol’ American who knows what is best for the region (does anyone here really believe that either the American Right or Left really knows? Any better than the did about WMDs?).

Crooked Timber indeed.

grin.

Almost certainly Iraq is better off without Saddam (probably even if he ends up being replaced by religious populists). But removal of Saddam is only half of the equation. Most people seem to forget that we also spent a couple of hundred billion dollars on tank rounds and padded Haliburton contracts, not to mention the lives of soldiers. One simply cannot say that the world is a better place without considering these opportunity costs. The question is not merely whether Iraq is better off, but whether there existed another place or people that would have benefited even more from such an expenditure, and whether there was some more efficient method to achieve our goals beyond a massive invasion and poorly planned occupation. I think the answer to both those questions has to be an unqualified yes.

asg:

Perhaps it will amuse you even more to note that there are in fact at least two ways to discredit the threat of force. As you point out, one would be to make it apparent that you are not actually willing to use force. However, there is another way that is at least as damaging.

The stated aim of the Bush administration was to enforce the UN resolution(s) and remove the threat posed by Saddam’s supposed weapon stockpiles (well, one of their aims, they are a bit slippery on the subject). Contrary to this Newsweek article or Bush’s statements on 14 July, Saddam had, in fact, allowed inspectors in, and, as others have pointed out, these inspectors had no complaints about the degree of cooperation. It would not have hurt US credibility in the least to back off a bit and wait for the outcome, certainly any further foot dragging from the Iraqis would rightfully trigger an invasion (possibly one with UN approval). Instead, when Iraqi cooperation began to become apparent, the administration changed their story entirely and began to make noise about regime change (the one demand which Saddam could obviously never agree to). The inspectors were told to leave (by the US, not Iraq), and shortly thereafter the attack was launched.

It was pretty clear that the US wanted war very badly, and on a tight schedule. No matter how high the Iraqis jumped, Bush & Co. would just set the bar higher. It is this sequence of events which ruins US credibility even more surely than inaction. Instead of “do what we say OR we’ll invade”, we have “do what we say AND we’ll invade”. Where is the diplomacy in that?

Life certainly would have been easier for Bush had the huge quantities of WMD’s been found. That they haven’t and that Bush hasn’t invented them should give some folks a clue that he sincerely believed them to be there.

Also, if you only get your news from mainstream outlets, and don’t look around too much (like actually reading transcripts or watching live David Kay’s testimony), you would believe that nothing was found in Iraq of significance. But this is far from the case.

Bush had good reason to believe that Saddam represented a WMD proliferation threat (which was what the war was about: the threat of Iraq arming terrorists with WMDs). Saddam apparently thought he had WMDs. His Generals thought they were available for combat – a number of Generals who were interrogated had heard orders to prepare to use the weapons, and when they complained that they had none, were told that their flanking divisions had them. This was monitored by US SIGINT resources. Every country in the world thought that Saddam had the weapons, although Bush critics seem to ignore this. It isn’t like George and Dick and Colin went into a huddle and invented this stuff – they had humint and techint that supported their conclusions.

Then there’s what was found. Kay found several active missile programs, any one of which was a valid casus belli. There was development of a long range solid fuel missile, a plan to greatly increase the range of their “legal” Al Samud missile which, it turned out, already had an illegal range capability, and the attempt to buy thousand kilometer range missiles from North Korea. Now, one might ask, what would a dictator with no WMD’s do with 1000 km range missiles? Answer: nothing useful. They are of no significance without WMD warheads.

Kay also found significant evidence of biological warfare programs, either in progress or ready to be started, with the laboratories in secret police headquarters. He found one active program (interestingly, involving ricin) which was also a direct violation of the rules. He found seed stock for botulin toxin.

The only thing NOT found was “large stockpiles” of WMDs, and an active nuclear program (although a buried uranium enrichment centrifuge and plans was turned over by a scientist who had buried it in his rose garden). However, an entire “large stockpile” could be hidden in a small house. And lets not forget the MIG jets that were found buried in the sand – found by accident because wind had unburied their tails. Because of the international market in nuclear technology (which was unmasked due to the War on Terror), Saddam probably planned to simply purchase a nuclear weapons program once the inspectors were gone and the sanctions lifted (and the sanction regime was wobbly and about to be lifted).

Add to this the fact that UN inspectors NEVER found Saddam’s previous large scale biological weapons program. Rather, it was revealed by Saddam’s son-in-law, after which the Iraqi regime revealed the records of a vast program that had been unsuspected by the inspectors during their 4 years of searching (1991-1995). This should give pause to those here who naively believe in the divining abilities of a few hundred UN inspectors in a totalitarian country which would happily gibbet the families of any scientist who told too much.

On top of this, it is clear that Saddam was a consistently bad decision maker, and when he made mistakes, lots of other people died. One of his mistakes was to attack Iran, leading to the Iran/Iraq war that killed about a million people. Another was invading Kuwait, causing Gulf War I. This guy was evil, but he wasn’t too bright. This made him even more dangerous than a rational opponent, because he was more likely than most dictators to do something dumb like hand chemical or biological weapons to terrorists, who just happened to be all over the place in Iraq, including some from Al Qaeda (Ansar Al Islam).

Finally, Kay stated that Iraq’s WMD scientists either had established or were about to establish a market for their expertise, because Saddam’s internal controls had broken down (which is one reason he didn’t even know what WMDs he had or didn’t have).

That Saddam was a great and growing danger is just as obvious today as it was last year or the year before. That removing him was an important part of protecting the nation from devastating attacks should be obvious (especially given Libya’s cave-in, which Qhadaffi told Berlusconi was because of his fear of America as a result of the toppling of Saddam).

Other than those with a touchingly naive belief in the powers of UN inspectors, can anyone provide a way that we could possibly have known that Saddam didn’t represent a threat and didn’t have WMD’s?

“How is it that verifiable disarmament and dismantling of programs is so very impossible and can’t be proven when it’s been done with great success and much acclaim in Ukraine, South Africa, Tawian, and Kazakhstan?”

The fact that you don’t understand the difference says more about your lack of research on the issue than it could possibly say about the hawk’s arguments. Verifiable disarmament can be quite successful when the country in question wants to disarm. The track record of verifiable disarmament in even mildly resisting states is complete failure.