@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:
There was no evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Hans Blix said that their inspections had found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction nor of programs to produce weapons of mass destruction. That you would have invaded Iraq does not surprise me, nor does it dismay me. I've already long ago realized that you are motivated by emotive propaganda, and not facts.
From
the Wikipedia article on Hans Blox:
Quote:Blix's statements about the Iraq WMD program came to contradict the claims of the George W. Bush administration, and attracted a great deal of criticism from supporters of the invasion of Iraq. In an interview on BBC 1 on 8 February 2004, Dr. Blix accused the US and British governments of dramatising the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to strengthen the case for the 2003 war against the regime of Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were ever found.
In an interview with London's The Guardian newspaper, Hans Blix said, "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media".
The question wasn't whether Iraq had WMD programs. The question was whether they still had them and had merely taken them underground. In the early 1970s, Saddam Hussein ordered the creation of a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Iraq's WMD programs were assisted by a wide variety of firms and governments in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1988, Iraq stated that it formally decided to build nuclear weapons. Under the 1988 plan, Iraq intended to have its first weapon by the summer of 1991. German centrifuge experts from the company H&H Metallform, came to Baghdad in 1988 and sold the Iraqis old designs for centrifuges. Five other German firms supplied equipment to manufacture botulin toxin and mycotoxin for germ warfare.
Iraq finally signed a treaty agreeing to eliminate such programs and to allow inspectors free access to verify that they had been destroyed. The US and the United Nations tried for years to ascertain that they had been destroyed, but Iraq was uncooperative. The United Nations said that Iraq was in material breach of its agreement and warned them over and over that they must comply. It is completely obvious that, given these facts, there was a realistic chance that Iraq had taken its WMD programs underground rather then eliminating them.
Someone like Saddam Hussein, a former assassin, a dictator who had invaded his neighbors and gassed his own people simply could not be permitted to have weapons so powerful that one use of one could kill hundreds of thousands. Had he obtained nuclear or biological weapons, the world would have paid a terrible price. In addition to using such weapons on his neighbors, he could have smuggled the pieces of such weapons into America and annihilated major population centers. Even a moderate chance of this was unacceptable.
After years and years of patient efforts to verify that the weapons programs were gone and years and years of warnings, president Bush finally invaded to ascertain to a certainty whether the weapons programs still existed. It was exactly the right thing to do.
