Libya announces end to all weapons programs

[The Emperor Fabulous]

Apparently, they're doing this to get trade with the US. They're also acknowledging that they had them in the first place. Bush is going to speak in a few moments.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

ha...he called him "moo-more al kadaafi"

[RGBVideo]

Umm... does it matter?

EDIT: Uh, this sounds pretty stupid first other-than-thread-starter-post. This comment was mainly inspired by:

Bush is going to speak in a few moments.

Why the hell would president hold a speech because some nation gives up it's WMD programme? Did anyone outside UN hold a special speech when Pakistan acquired nuclear weaponry?

[Sprayber]

Damn, talk about coming out of left field.

[JohnT]

Why? We've shown what we'll do to countries that violate UN sanctions and ignore the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind". Note that they didn't bother negotiating to the French and Germans, but rather the UK and US.

I wonder why... ?

[Ned]

Obviously this was done out of fear and respect for the United Nations and had nothing to do with Blair and Bush taking out Saddam.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

The speak-loud-while-carrying-a-big-stick policy certainly has its effects

[JohnT]

Obviously.

Edit: Response to Ned.

[Gibsie]

So I guess all them people who said that diplomacy could never make a utball dictator disarm were wrong then

[Sprayber]

Originally posted by Gibsie
So I guess all them people who said that diplomacy could never make a utball dictator disarm were wrong then

It's not that it could never work. It's just that the dictator had to be willing to actually negotiate instead of stall.

[Chemical Ollie]

America has forgiven Hirohito too.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Gibsie
So I guess all them people who said that diplomacy could never make a utball dictator disarm were wrong then

I heard on the tube that negotiations began 9 months ago. That would make it late March, early April when the negotiations began. Methinks events to the east of Libya had something to do with the opening of said negotiations, dontcha think?

[Sprayber]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
America has forgiven Hirohito too.

Hirohito has what do to do with this? I'm sure you can bring something up that has happened a little more recently.

[Ned]

Howard Dean, " I congratulate Prime Minister Blair and the US negotiators on their success in persuading Moammar Kaddafi to give up his weapons of mass destruction and allow inspectors to verify compliance. I only hope that these inspectors are UN inspectors and not American inspectors because only UN inspectors would have any credibility in the international community. When the UN inspectors said that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, they were right. We should have trusted them rather than trust the war mongering Bush administration. This is why we need the UN to lead this effort because we cannot trust Bush."

[RGBVideo]

(from the other thread...)

if i remember correctly iraq wasn't wholly co-operative with the UN inspectors

This seems to be a common phrase.

Could someone tell me, that if Iraq had no these famous WMD's, then why were they 'not wholly co-operating' with the weapon inspectors? And what does that phrase even mean, anyway?

According to Hans Blix, leader of the UN weapons inspector team:

as the US build-up for an invasion of Iraq intensified, US administration officials had leaned on his weapons inspectors to use more damning language in their reports on Iraq.

This would indicate that since there were no weapons to be found, UN team was pushed to make false claims about the level of co-operation by Iraqi officials.

The whole "they didn't co-operate" -thing has been bugging me for a while.

OTOH, this is threadjacking.
EDIT: link added