THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Al Qaeda was sheltered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda in both countries trained people to murder innocent people.

Heh, THAT came out of nowhere, Icann. Why the sudden vitriol? I thought you were more of a policy debate kind of guy.

ican711nm wrote:

Al Qaeda in both countries trained people to murder innocent people.

Which one was it where they were trained in flight schools for piloting the 9/11 attack?

ican711nm wrote:

JOHN KERRY IS A PURVEYOR OF FAIRY TALES (I.E., KERRY IS A CHARLATAN)

John Kerry spent at least the six months preceeding the first debate claiming in both speech and TV ads that George Bush is a liar. When asked in the first debate to explain this claim of his, he declared he never accused George Bush of lying. Two days after the first debate, John Kerry released a TV ad claiming Bush was a liar.

Bush spent six months during the run up to Iraq demonstrating Kerry's claim. About the only thing left to debate is whether it was flat out lying, or just gross exaggeration and cherry picking of intel.

How come the pro-military, lets-win-not vilify the war side is parroting lies, and the Iraq-is-an-illegal- and-immoral-war side, who also restate nd restate and RESTATE their opinions, are not parroting lies?

It seems to me that when a person is secure in his/her convictions, the only response that can be made is to restate one's convictions. Seems to me the lets-win-the-war people have provided pretty good support--links/reason/logic--for their opinions, while the opposition have had little ammunition other than personal opinion/ideology, slurs against the leadership, and conjecture about lies re the war and administration policy,

I think, arebuttal limited to saying something is not true with nothing to back up the opinion, or a personal attack, even by insinuation or innuendo, is not very persuasive. (I reference the
pages in this thread rather than link specific examples.)

Quote:

Al Qaeda was sheltered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda in both countries trained people to murder innocent people.

You keep holding these two up as if they were both true. THEY ARE NOT.

You are equating two things which are not equal. You are implying that the taliban's WELL-DOCUMENTED and long-time support of AQ is somehow equal to Iraq's extremely limited, and arguably disprovable support of AQ. IT IS NOT.

You're like a broken record, discounting facts, always returning to the same position over and over again in an attempt to justify your worldview...

(9-11 Commission Report) 10.3 "PHASE TWO" AND THE QUESTION OF IRAQ
...
Responding to a presidential tasking, Clarke's office sent a memo to Rice on September 18, "Survey of Intelligence Information on Any Iraq Involvement in the September 11 Attacks." Rice's chief staffer on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, concurred in its conclusion that only some anecdotal evidence linked Iraq to al Qaeda. The memo found no "compelling case" that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks. 62

](9-11 Commission Report) 2.5 AL QAEDA 'S RENEWAL IN AFGHANISTAN (1996-1998) But the Taliban, like the Sudanese, would eventually hear warnings, including from the Saudi monarchy.72

Though Bin Ladin had promised Taliban leaders that he would be circumspect, he broke this promise almost immediately, giving an inflammatory interview to CNN in March 1997. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar promptly "invited" Bin Ladin to move to Kandahar, ostensibly in the interests of Bin Ladin's own security but more likely to situate him where he might be easier to control.73

There is also evidence that around this time Bin Ladin sent out a number of feelers to the Iraqi regime, offering some cooperation. None are reported to have received a significant response. According to one report, Saddam Hussein's efforts at this time to rebuild relations with the Saudis and other Middle Eastern regimes led him to stay clear of Bin Ladin.74

In mid-1998, the situation reversed; it was Iraq that reportedly took the initiative. In March 1998, after Bin Ladin's public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported that one, or perhaps both, of these meetings was apparently arranged through Bin Ladin's Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to the Iraqis. In 1998, Iraq was under intensifying U.S. pressure, which culminated in a series of large air attacks in December.75

Similar meetings between Iraqi officials and Bin Ladin or his aides may have occurred in 1999 during a period of some reported strains with the Taliban. According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Ladin declined, apparently judging that his circumstances in Afghanistan remained more favorable than the Iraqi alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sides' hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. ...76

And you've been going around and around and around...Aren't you dizzy yet?

Don't want to go to all the trouble of looking up all that information again. It is here all over the place.

a very troubling situation has developed in the Middle East that has ominous implications, not just for our national security but literally for the security of all civilized and law-abiding areas of the world.


Even after the overwhelming defeat that the coalition forces visited upon Iraq in and near Kuwait in the Desert Storm conflict, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's truculence has continued unabated. In the final days of that conflict, a fateful decision was made not to utterly vanquish the Iraqi Government and armed forces, on the grounds that to do so would leave a risky vacuum, as some then referred to it, in the Middle East which Iran or Syria or other destabilizing elements might move to fill.

But instead of reforming his behavior after he was handed an historic defeat, Saddam Hussein has continued to push international patience to the very edge. The United Nations, even with many member nations which strongly favor commerce over conflict, has established and maintained sanctions designed to isolate Iraq, keep it too weak to threaten other nations, and push Saddam Hussein to abide by accepted norms of national behavior. These sanctions have cost Iraq over $100 billion and have significantly restrained his economy. They unavoidably also have exacted a very high price from the Iraqi people, but this has not appeared to bother Saddam Hussein in the least. Nor have the sanctions succeeded in obtaining acceptable behavior from Saddam .

Now, during the past 2 weeks, Saddam again has raised his obstinately uncooperative profile. We all know of his announcement that he will no longer permit United States citizens to participate in the U.N. inspection team searching Iraq for violations of the U.N. requirement that Iraq not build or store weapons of mass destruction. And he has made good on his announcement. The UNSCOM inspection team, that is, the United Nations Special Commission team, has been refused access to its inspection targets throughout the week and once again today because it has Americans as team members. While it is not certain, it is not unreasonable to assume that Saddam's action may have been precipitated by the fear that the U.N. inspectors were getting uncomfortably close to discovering some caches of reprehensible weapons of mass destruction, or facilities to manufacture them, that many have long feared he is doing everything in his power to build, hide, and hoard.

Another reason may be that Saddam Hussein , who unquestionably has demonstrated a kind of perverse personal resiliency, may be looking at the international landscape and concluding that, just perhaps, support may be waning for the United States's determination to keep him on a short leash via multilateral sanctions and weapons inspections. This latest action may, indeed, be his warped idea of an acid test of that conclusion.

We should all be encouraged by the reactions of many of our allies, who are evincing the same objections to Iraq's course that are prevalent here in the United States. There is an inescapable reality that, after all of the effort of recent years, Saddam Hussein remains the international outlaw he was when he invaded Kuwait. For most of a decade he has set himself outside international law, and he has sought to avoid the efforts of the international community to insist that his nation comport itself with reasonable standards of behavior and, specifically, not equip itself with implements of mass destruction which it has shown the willingness to use in previous conflicts.

Plainly and simply, Saddam Hussein cannot be permitted to get away with his antics, or with this latest excuse for avoidance of international responsibility.

This is especially true when only days earlier, after months of negotiations, the administration extracted some very serious commitments from China, during President Jiang Zemin's state visit to Washington, to halt several types of proliferation activities. It is unthinkable that we and our allies would stand by and permit a renegade such as Saddam Hussein , who has demonstrated a willingness to engage in warfare and ignore the sovereignty of neighboring nations, to engage in activities that we insist be halted by China, Russia, and other nations.

Let me say that I agree with the determination by the administration, at the outset of this development, to take a measured and multilateral approach to this latest provocation. It is of vital importance to let the United Nations first respond to Saddam's actions. After all, those actions are first and foremost an affront to the United Nations and all its membership which has, in a too-rare example of unity in the face of belligerent threats from a rogue State, managed to maintain its determination to keep Iraq isolated via a regime of sanctions and inspections.

I think we should commend the resolve of the Chief U.N. Inspector, UNSCOM head Richard Butler, who has refused to bend or budge in the face of Saddam's intransigence. Again and again he has assembled the inspection team, including the U.S. citizens who are part of it, and presented it to do its work, despite being refused access by Iraq.

He rejected taking the easy way out by asking the U.S. participants simply to step aside until the problem is resolved so that the inspections could go forward. He has painstakingly documented what is occurring, and has filed regular reports to the Security Council. He clearly recognizes this situation to be the matter of vital principle that we believe it to be.

The Security Council correctly wants to resolve this matter if it is possible to do so without plunging into armed conflict, be it great or small. So it sent a negotiating team to Baghdad to try to resolve the dispute and secure appropriate access for UNSCOM's inspection team. To remove a point of possible contention as the negotiators sought to accomplish their mission, the United Nations asked that the U.S. temporarily suspend reconnaissance flights over Iraq that are conducted with our U-2 aircraft under U.N. auspices, and we complied. At that time, in my judgment this was the appropriate and responsible course.

But now we know that Saddam Hussein has chosen to blow off the negotiating team entirely. It has returned emptyhanded to report to the Security Council tomorrow. That is why I have come to the floor this evening to speak about this matter, to express what I think is the feeling of many Senators and other Americans as the Security Council convenes tomorrow.

We must not presume that these conclusions automatically will be accepted by every one of our allies, Mr. President, I could explore other possible ominous consequences of letting Saddam Hussein proceed unchecked. The possible scenarios I have referenced really are only the most obvious possibilities. What is vital is that Americans understand, and that the Security Council understand, that there is no good outcome possible if he is permitted to do anything other than acquiesce to continuation of U.N. inspections.

As the world's only current superpower, we have the enormous responsibility not to exhibit arrogance, not to take any unwitting or unnecessary risks, and not to employ armed force casually. But at the same time it is our responsibility not to shy away from those confrontations that really matter in the long run. And this matters in the long run.

While our actions should be thoughtfully and carefully determined and structured, while we should always seek to use peaceful and diplomatic means to resolve serious problems before resorting to force, and while we should always seek to take significant international actions on a multilateral rather than a unilateral basis whenever that is possible, if in the final analysis we face what we truly believe to be a grave threat to the well-being of our Nation or the entire world and it cannot be removed peacefully, we must have the courage to do what we believe is right and wise.

I believe this is such a situation, Mr. President. It is a time for resolve. Tomorrow we must make that clear to the Security Council and to the world.

I yield back the balance of my time.
http://www.nationalreview.com/document/kerry200401261431.asp

To enlighten all the others that may wish to read the article in its entirety, and to determine the credibility of icann's posts.
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In Their Own Words: Iraq's 'Imminent' Threat

January 29, 2004
Download: DOC, PDF, RTF

The Bush Administration is now saying it never told the public that Iraq was an "imminent" threat ...

"Absolutely."
• White House spokesman Ari Fleischer answering whether Iraq was an "imminent threat," 5/7/03

"This is about imminent threat."
• White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 2/10/03

"Well, of course he is.”
• White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett responding to the question “is Saddam an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?”, 1/26/03

"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02

"Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain. And we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons. Iraq has these weapons."
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 9/18/02