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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (790842)	6/23/2014 3:05:29 AM
From: Bilow	1 Recommendation Recommended By bentway Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1584366

Hi i-node; Re: "Look, the intelligence was wrong. That is evident. It was not George Bush dreaming up the intelligence. You had the head of CIA telling him it was "slam dunk" ..." You can always rely on your employees to tell you what you want to believe. Obama has the same issue but in spades. In fact, every CEO has to fight this. What the "head of CIA" believes doesn't matter. What matters is what the analysts at the CIA believe and no, they did not believe that Iraq was a WMD threat and they certainly never had proof of WMDs. If they did have proof, all they had to do was to give it to the inspectors and let it be proven. This they did not do because they did not have proof. Hell, Obama has "proof" from various heads of various agencies that global warming from fossil fuel usage is the cause of a whole bunch of things that have been going on for thousands of years. These are political appointees, they are liars. Re: "... you had every major western intelligence agency supporting the claim ..."; Bullcrap. What you had was the people who wanted to believe in WMDs interpreting statements by other people in favor of the position they wanted to believe in, while ignoring vast amounts of statements that disagreed with their position. Re: "... President Clinton -- who hadn't been out of office that long believed it."; It's at least possible that Clinton believed this. I haven't seen it. I argued this point (did Iraq have WMDs) for months before the invasion here on Silicon Investor. No one ever provided me the slightest evidence that they were there. It was all a matter of "logic" along the line of "of course this dictator would never get rid of his WMDs" and "he hid them before; therefore he must be hiding them now" and "we know that Iraq has WMDs because this deserter (who desperately wants us to start a war) says so". None of that is analytical evidence of WMDs that would be accepted as "proof" of WMDs by an analyst at the CIA. What you need for proof are photographs. An example of "proof" in military affairs are the photographs that Kennedy used to show that there were missiles in Cuba. There was none of this sort of thing. None. And Iraq was allowing the UN investigators to go wherever the CIA wanted them to go. Did the CIA tell them where the vast quantities of WMDs were? No. They found pathetic quantities, the little scraps that the US is still finding on its own territory. At best the whole thing was just wishful thinking that was very convincing to the politicians; they used it as justification for something they wanted to do for other reasons. That would mostly be because they were completely ignorant of the history of the region and really thought that our troops would be welcomed with flowers by a population that would march forward, in lockstep unison, into a US-loving, freedomistic and capitalistic future. This was another argument we had on SI. They were complete idiots, it wasn't just WMDs, everything they thought about Iraq was wrong. And on the WMDs it was more than that. The public was woefully ignorant of the utility of the chemical weapons that were under discussion. These were not sophisticated modern gasses. They were typical WW1 stuff. Gasses are much less useful in a modern war now (due to the much greater distances between combatants) but were of little use even in the confined battlefields of the first world war (where the trenches were only yards apart, in places). And during World War 1 it is a military fact (that anyone can look up) that the world's factories had to manufacture 190,000 tons of chemical weapons in order to kill 100,000 soldiers and wound another 1.2 million. There were 10 million soldiers killed in that war, chemical weapons accounted for about 1% of that. And everyone knew that Iraq's chemical weapon supply had been attrited since their war with Iran. But even in that war, against the completely incompetent Iranian excuse for a military, chemical weapons only accounted for around 10% of the Iranian casualties. The WMD issue was pure propaganda, nothing else, right from the start. These were never "weapons of mass destruction". You want a weapon of mass destruction? Try nuclear bombs. Or even artillery. The chemical weapons were never more than just "weapons of political expediency". The purpose of the name was to scare the public into supporting a stupid political idea. Just like "global warming" now, the public is always manipulated by using their natural fears. -- Carl P.S. At the time there was a lot of right-wing Israeli support for the Iraq invasion. I wonder what they're thinking now. When I visit Israeli sites I see them obsessing over a kidnapping. They have a border with Syria. You'd think they'd be more worried. Maybe they're hoping that the new Caliphate will eliminate their problem with Iranian supported shia groups in Lebanon. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes. It's obvious that we're not going back; they'll be on their own.