Why did the US invade Iraq?

[TheStinger]

Genocide wasn't argued, if it was then the it would have set a precedent to go and stop half of the worlds conflicts.

[Arrian]

No **** they are fallible. I think the result confirms that, but to continue to say 'WMD bs' is far from being honest

You can buy bs in good faith. The WMD stuff was bs, aggressively spun by the Bush admin as a casus belli. That doesn't make every person who bought into it guilty of bsing. It makes them gullible/fallible, which is different.

-Arrian

[Arrian]

Where the **** did genocide come from? That has never been used as a justification for the war. Wow, Sloww, following the Bush playbook, I see. When proven wrong, simply slide over to a new argument.

-Arrian

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by VJ

Kaak, please read this. The UN resolution worked. Saddam did exactly what UN requested him to do.

The claim that US invaded because anyone in the white house was afraid of WMD is absolute and complete bull****, as should've been apparent to you if you would've actually watched the "proof" of WMD within Iraq presented by Colin Powell in the UN shortly before the invasion (instead of Fox news spin which, I could imagine from the way how some of you constantly invoked that speech, showed two seconds of him talking in the UN and then cut to TV commentator/spinmeißter who loudly proclaimed how Powell presented the FINAL PROOF that there was no doubt that Hussein had WMD): fuzzy satellite pictures of random trucks, conversations of unknown people talking about how someone is getting close to them, and forged documents which were proven to be frauds within minutes of their presentation to the UN.

Actually if memory serves there were two material breaches albeit small. Existance of long range ballistic missiles which the Iraqis reluctantly began destroying at a snails pace and the existance or inability of the Iraqis to prove destruction of Anthrax supplies/manufacturing capabilities.

It is also widely accepted that (courtesy of Wiki)

According to the weapons inspection teams that have investigated Iraq since 2003 (UNMOVIC and Iraq Survey Group), Iraq was in violation of WMD-related prohibitions. ISG in particular stated: "The Regime made a token effort to comply with the disarmament process, but the Iraqis never intended to meet the spirit of the UNSC’s resolutions. Outward acts of compliance belied a covert desire to resume WMD activities."

In its 13th Quarterly Report, dated May 30 2003, UNMOVIC declared that although new inspections had begun in January, "the long list of proscribed items unaccounted for and as such resulting in unresolved disarmament issues was not shortened either by the inspections or by Iraqi declarations and documentation...with respect to anthrax, the Commission, as it reported, had strong indications — but not conclusive evidence — that all the quantities produced had not been destroyed, and that hence even today such quantities could remain."

While most of Iraq's WMD programs had been reduced to widely-distributed parts and plans hidden in various locations, it continued to maintain a biological agent production facility which tested agents tailored for assassination on human subjects during the sanctions era. This has generally been ignored by commentators on grounds that assassination agents do not technically count as "WMDs", being targeted at single people rather than whole populations. Nonetheless, such technology was proscribed for possession by Iraq on grounds that a simple retooling could easily turn an assassination bioweapons lab into a WMD factory.

Now all that being said of course UN 1441 was a pretext to war with an expectation that there was no way that Sadaam could comply.

So the question again per the OP is why after so many years the decision to pull the trigger and go to war.

[Ecthy]

On a sidenote: I think most IR profs are kind of leaning to realist schools

[Urban Ranger]

My PoV is the Bushies wanted to have a stronger influence over the Middle East, which has a large share of oil. Iraq was weak from a decade of sanctions and all that BCN stuff made a good excuse.

I see the action as cynical opportunistic. Then again I am pretty much a realist when it comes to international relations.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Arrian


You can buy bs in good faith. The WMD stuff was bs, aggressively spun by the Bush admin as a casus belli. That doesn't make every person who bought into it guilty of bsing. It makes them gullible/fallible, which is different.

-Arrian

Again, people who knew a hell of a lot more about Saddam, weapons programs, and Saddam's weapons programs than you, Bush, Blair, and all the posters on this board put together thought Saddam had them.

So shove the

Some actually bought the WMD bs.

bs.

[DaShi]

Who? Martin Gardner?

[notyoueither]

David Kelly, whom I believe was Whitehall's expert on the subject of Saddam and his weapons programs.

[DaShi]

Ok, so who would win in a fight:

Martin Gardner or David Kelly?

[notyoueither]

Maybe Hans Blix. Not even he was stupid enough to say Saddam 'had no WMD.'

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/27/sprj.irq.transcript.blix/

Monday, January 27, 2003 Posted: 4:38 PM EST (2138 GMT)

Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed the inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.

I shall only give some examples of issues and questions that need to be answered, and I turn first to the sector of chemical weapons.

The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed. Iraq has declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tons, and that the quality was poor and the product unstable.

Consequently, it was said that the agent was never weaponized.

Iraq said that the small quantity of [the] agent remaining after the Gulf War was unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

UNMOVIC, however, has information that conflicts with this account. There are indications that Iraq had worked on the problem of purity and stabilization and that more had been achieved than has been declared. Indeed, even one of the documents provided by Iraq indicates that the purity of the agent, at least in laboratory production, was higher than declared.

There are also indications that the agent was weaponized. In addition, there are questions to be answered concerning the fate of the VX precursor chemicals, which Iraq states were lost during bombing in the Gulf War or were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

I would now like to turn to the so-called air force document that I have discussed with the council before. This document was originally found by an UNSCOM inspector in a safe in Iraqi air force headquarters in 1998, and taken from her by Iraq minders. It gives an account of the expenditure of bombs, including chemical bombs by Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War. I'm encouraged by the fact that Iraq has now provided this document to UNMOVIC.

The document indicates that 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi air force between 1983 and 1998, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tons. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for.

The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at the storage depot, 170 kilometers southwest of Baghdad, was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved here in the past few years at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. The investigation of these rockets is still proceeding.

Iraq states that they were overlooked from 1991 from a batch of some 2,000 that were stored there during the Gulf War. This could be the case. They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve, but rather points to the issue of several thousand of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for. The finding of the rockets shows that Iraq needs to make more effort to ensure that its declaration is currently accurate.

[DaShi]

Also, David Kelly was responsible for "Alley McBeal," so I don't give him much credence.

[Sandman]

He was also the source of the claim that the UK government's dossier was 'sexed up'. Which we now know to be true.

[notyoueither]

So he was aquainted with the truth, yes?

And he was convinced Saddam had hidden weapons and weapons programmes, wasn't he?

And the issue is if it was plainly obvious that Saddam had none prior to the invasion, isn't it?

[Sikander]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Maybe Hans Blix. Not even he was stupid enough to say Saddam 'had no WMD.'

Yea, but I can't believe he fell for Kim's old shark tank trap door routine.