Blair and WMDs

bloggs

Why does Blair seem to think the WMDs will be found in Iraq. The dogs in the street know there are none, and the brits and yanks have been there for over 5 months and they still haven't found anything. Why won't Tony just come out and say 'sorry people, i was wrong about Iraq having WMDs' as we all know this is the case. Blair seems to go around dodging the 45 min claim, but it seems to be just the tip of the iceberg!

Who should resign? Blair for lying to the public, or MI6 who lied to Blair about Iraq for having WMDs. Or should people in MI6 just resign as they're 'evidence' was so f**ked up?

shotamoose

Blair doesn't talk much now about finding weapons of MD in Iraq, just uncovering evidence of programmes to develop them. Maybe he'll settle for saying "Well, Saddam would have developed them if he could! But now he can't! So we must have been right to invade!".

I really think he might be better off if he just came out and said "Look, we got it wrong. We honestly thought he still had some WMD, but it turns out he didn't. Sorry".

Note that I'm assuming they honestly believed what they were saying. Blair seems capable of honestly believing anything it is politically useful for him to believe, no matter how daft (Public Private Partnerships are a really good idea; the housing crisis is not a significant problem; Peter Mandelson is a trustworthy and valuable political ally ... etc) so I think he may actually have believed this too. But the people around him should have pointed out that the evidence was in no way conclusive and stopped him acting like it was. So maybe they should resign and he should be put in the nuthouse.

[edit: I notice that TB said in today's press conference of the occupation of Iraq, "If this goes wrong then the whole of the Middle East goes wrong". Since it looks like the occupation of Iraq is going pretty badly wrong, will he ever be willing to resign over the piffling matter of making the whole of the Middle East go wrong?]

bloggs

I would love to know what is/was going though his head. Did Dubya say, he Tony i got an idea, let attack Iraq. The Tony says 'well we need a reason'.

Stark

Great that they need a reason of the form "they have weapons of mass destruction". Obviously the fact that Saddam and his sons were gruesomely killing and torturing millions of innocent people wasn't a good enough reason. But ah sure what does the british or american public care about that, they're not white people after all.

bloggs

I think if they actually had come out in the beginning and said that they were going there to remove saddam because he is a bad guy people would have been more supportive, but all this WMD/terrorist rubbish just made things worse for them. Also they keep changing the reasons, when people coped on it wasn't for that. first WMDs, then terrorists, then WMDs again, the because saddam is a bad guy...

I wonder if Tony can manage to claw his way back in the next election (2005???), they say a week is a long time in politics, so perhaps he can turn things around.

Sleipnir

Yes, thankfully the U.S. and Britain were they to ruch in and save the poor from the evil Saddam.
Like they did in Somalia.
And Nicaragua
And Burma
And Rwanda thousands of innocents were slaughtered.
Zimbabwe, oh no, wait us British have a lot of corporate interests in zimbabwe making a ton of money. Mugabe's alright.

If it's not on CNN or Sky it doesn't happen. It was only when the media told you how evil Saddam was that you figured something needed to be done about it. See no evil, hear no evil.

Oh and when British came out of the sky to save the 100,000 people esimated to have been killed by Idi Amin's secret police in Uganda.
Oh but wait, Idi was educated in Britain and spent a lot of time there (I believe he even met the Queen?) so surely he's not a bad old chap.

Don't kid yourself k.oriordan there are countries all over the world with despotic leaders killing left right and centre, but they don't have any natural resources the americans and british can use.
Iraq most certainly does.


"If they turn on the radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs (surface-to-air missiles). They know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need."

--U.S. Brig. General William Looney, talking about recent attacks on Iraq (Interview Washington Post, August 30, 1999)

bloggs

Blair seems to wish this whole sorry mess would just go away, sorta like it is in the US (what are WMDs, i haven't heard of those in a while, we are more interested in troops getting killed). I think the UK public aren't as brainwashed as the Americans (no offence), so they will push for answers and i hope they will continue to push for answer to why the UK went to war with a country over WMDs only to find out these weapons don't or never existed.

Sleipnir

that's one thing that really annoys me.
The British public are demanding answers as to why they were lied to.
The American public just seem to have lapped it all up.
Why are they not asking the same questions of their own government?
Especially seeing as the U.S. and British intelligence services work so closely together.

bonkey

Originally posted by Kananga
Why are they not asking the same questions of their own government?

IMHO.....

Because the BBC were willing to get into a shouting match with the government, and not be bullied into shutting up.

This included them getting lambasted from many fronts as being the bad guys. They stuck with it until things started unravelling...

No major US news corporation has the guts/ability to do that to its administration in the current context.

jc

Geromino

Originally posted by k.oriordan
Great that they need a reason of the form "they have weapons of mass destruction". Obviously the fact that Saddam and his sons were gruesomely killing and torturing millions of innocent people wasn't a good enough reason. But ah sure what does the british or american public care about that, they're not white people after all.

I take it you have not been to the US coming from the statement I just read which I find completely offensive and racist. But what to expect from this board.

As for the US, President Bush should have stated the numerous violations of UN resolutions, particularly 686. The UN tried from 1991 through 1998 to get Saddem to comply. He did not. Russia even in 1998 proposed a resolution to end the sanctions on Iraq and have the inspections ended. Thankfully, that did not happen and would have been a fatal error on the UN (and of course, the board members would have blamed the US for simply being a part, how bogus).

As for not asking questions, the American public has moved on. We know the truth will be revealed eventually. We do things very differently over here. Just because you do not read about it does not mean the right people are asking questions. Now, I am not talking about the Democratic candidates who are touring the country in hopes of winning the White House in 2004. But there are specific individuals from both parties, with unique access to the various agencies concerned with intelligence, foreign policy, and the Presidency who are asking the questions. They have leaned that open confrontation like Watergate and IranContra do not work only polarize the issue where the truth will drown in a sea of perverse propaganda.

To Kananga:
Somalia: do you mean the fiasco by the Pakistanis which prompted the UN to call for US troops? The UN could not accomplish its mission of providing humanitarian aid because of the clan wars within Somalia. If you recall, Aideed ambushed and killed 23 Pakistanis in Sept 1993. US handed over control to the UN in May 1993. The tragic loss of American troops in Somalia occured in Oct 2003 at a time where the UN was in control. The UN could not accomplish its basic mission. That was accomplished by US forces in distributing massive humanitarian aid.

I could do the same for the other nations you mentioned, but I am tired now.

Sleipnir

Geronimo,

I have been to N.Y. in the past 6 months and one of the things I did notice was an unwillingness to speak out against the current U.S. administration, on any subject. It was only when I mentioned Iraq or 9/11 that people went quite and told me that you don't speak about things like that unless you agree with the U.S. on those subjects.

Why would Russia's request to end the sanctions on Iraq and stop the weapons inspections have been such a disaster? Seeing as the in inspections have not found any evidence of WMD's or weapons programs?
There were no WMD's found up to 1998, and there were none found between 1998 & 2003. So how could cancelling them in '98 have been a 'fatal error'
The sanctions did nothing whatsoever to Saddam Hussein or his cohorts, thousands of children did die however.


Moved on? In what respect? The war in Iraq is still on you know.
If you've already moved on (which I read as 'forgotten about')and are not troubled by whether or not the people of America were lied to in order to gain support for a war, then your country is in more serious trouble than I thought.
The American people have a duty to read about, speak about and write about it.
Waiting for one politician to ask another at some point in the future when nobody really cares any more anyway just isn't good enough.
Anyway, the politicians won't feel the need to supply an answer if the public are not asking questions.

SkepticOne

Originally posted by Kananga
There were no WMD's found up to 1998

Prior to their departure, the inspection teams had destroyed or made unusable 48 long range missiles, 14 conventional missile warheads, 30 chemical warheads, "supergun" components, close to 40,000 chemical munitions, 690 tonnes of chemical weapons agents and the al-Hakam biological weapons plant. It had discovered evidence of a nuclear programme that was more advanced than previously expected.

Some inspectors suspected that Iraq's NBC programmes remained intact. However, the former Unscom inspector, Scott Ritter, insisted that Iraq was left with no capability to resume NBC programmes or weaponise any hidden stocks. The Bush administration refuses to accept this, but with no reliable monitoring since 1998, there is no way of knowing if Iraq still has weapons of mass destruction.

[source]

Sleipnir

ok, I stand corrected on the existence pre-98 weapons.
With that in mind, it is therefore about 5 years since the WMD threat was removed from Iraq.

Some inspectors suspected that Iraq's NBC programmes remained intact.

This was proven by Hans Blik's inspectorate to be incorrect.
When the inspections resumed, no weapons were found.
So where is the threat?
Why the big scare in 2002/2003 about WMD's?

bonkey

Well, listing to ms Rice on CNN last night, it would appear that the administration are now taking the line that there were "doubts"....not any big scare, nor any confirmed threat. All the talk about not waiting for a mushroom cloud as certainty was not trying to imply that Saddam had nuclear capacity, but rather to highlight that there were doubts that he did not have nuclear capability, or was acquiring it, or was hoping to acquire it, or, or, or.

Of course...they completely dodge answering (if even asked) how they could justify war on the basis of such "doubts".

jc

bloggs

It's a bloody cover-up in the UK, while in the USA, people don't seem to give a sh**.

Either MI6 got it totally wrong, or Tony and Co turned it into a fantasy story. Someone needs to get a rap on the knuckles for this.

A full inquery is required, but no sign of that every happening.