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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (118798)	11/6/2003 7:13:48 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

He may have done this, but those programs were clearly destroyed. Can you PROVE that all of the remaining THOUSANDS of unaccounted for WMDs were clearly destroyed as well? Didn't think so... The case remains open.. Hawk

To: epicure who wrote (118798)	11/6/2003 8:19:07 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

1) Iraqi intelligence aided in the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center. The chief conspirator fled American justice - straight to Baghdad - This conspirator also lived in Manilla, and was also in Pakistan (and was caught there, I think). The fact that he passed through Baghdad doesn't prove anything- these guys are highly mobile and the fact that he went to Baghdad first, probably means it was his primary destination, since travelling through countries to cover their tracks is de rigeur in Yousef's line of work. People don't pass 'by chance' through the capital city of a totalitarian police state - certainly not guys in Youself's line of work. He had somebody waiting for him in Baghdad. To assert otherwise is to display ignorance of the nature of Saddam's rule. 2) Saddam paid Zawahiri $300,000 in 1998; thus, he had already funded Al Qaida- Zawahiri had interests other than Al Qaeda, and other than America. We know that Saddam had interests in religional terrorism, but evidence of other interests is not very clear. If Zawahiri's interests were so different from Al Qaida, why did he merge the Muslim Brotherhood with Al Qaida later that same year? 3) Iraqi intelligence was aiding an funding Ansar al Islam, an al Qaida-affiliated Islamist organization Ansar may have links to Al Qaeda - but they are hardly the same organization. Ansar, after all, has interests on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq- in the Kurdish controlled portion of the country. It would be very odd if Saddam was really very interested in funding them, because they are Wahhabi-like in their religious devotion, and they certainly wouldn't support Saddam as their leader of choice. I'm sure Saddam would have been interested in spying on them, but funding groups it the Kurdish controlled areas, enemical to his won interests? Doesn't sound very likely, unless he was accumulating information on them in order to destroy them. Ansar's strongest holdout was in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, where Saddam had big and obvious interests in funding them agains the the Kurds. This point about how Saddam could not have funded them because they were Wahabbis is ridiculous. If ideological enemies never make alliance against a common enemy, then I guess Winston Churchill never allied with Stalin in WWII. 4) Saddam had a long history of making and using bio and chem weapons, even giving up billions in revenue to hide his programs from the UN in defiance of UN sanctions. He may have done this, but those programs were clearly destroyed. And oddly enough we didn't mind when he used WMD's on the Iranians, and we didn't even do anything when he used them on the Kurds. Oh yes, Saddam had a history all right- a history we are complicit in. Saddam never used WMD's on the west, because he wasn't an idiot- and we knew that. He knew what would have happened to him if he had used them. He obviously thought that if he was too honest about how little he had left, no one would respect him anymore. Silly him, but more fool us. The destruction of the WMDs wasn't obvious to anybody - paying billions to hide weapons you don't have anymore is not a working assumption most intelligence agencies would sink their credit in. It simply goes to show that Saddam made irrational decisions. (BTW, I love this reflex 'we were complicit' swipe - which upsets you more, when the US supported Saddam against Iran or when they deposed him? one would think that if the first displeased you, then the second must please you. But one would be wrong.) 5) Saddam was actively training Islamist terrorists in Salman Pak He may have been- but we don't know what kind of terrorists he was training. We have known (and approved) of Saddam's anti-Iranian terrorists, and he had other interests in the region- but it is not apparent that he trained any terrorists for Weatern targets. You don't have any real proof of that Nadine. You have conjecture. Who are the usual targets of Islamists? How much would you bet that we weren't among them? Have you forgotten 9/11 already? 6) Saddam was proclaiming himself victor against America, louder and louder, and adopting the Islamist program in public. Saddam bluffed in the Iraq war part one, and he did the same in the part two. No big surprise there. I'm not sure why you even use this one as any kind of "proof". Number 6 is lame. Number 6 goes to intent. Arab politicians have for many years been sucked into foolish or even suicidal courses by their own bravado. Witness Nasser in May 1967. 7) Containment and sanctions were breaking down, aided and abetted by France and Russia. How do you figure? The fact that he had no real threatening weapons makes it look like sanctions were working. His infrastructure was crumbling, and he probably would have been brought down by internal rot- and even if he wasn't, who cares? It's not like we've found any evidence that he was planning anything. Because support for sanctions was just about gone in the UN, and the sanctions themselves had become so full of holes that they scarcely mattered. France was lobbying in the UNSC to get them lifted - we had managed to stop this so far, but at considerable cost in trouble and political capital. Do you want to see all ways and evidence for this? Read Ken Pollack, he'll tell you in detail. maybe uncontroverted in the papers you read- I see those things controverted all the time One could also argue that the Sun rises in the West, that wouldn't make it controverted. It would just mean that arguer valued partisanship over credibility.