Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

Blatham - First, you make a bunch of authoritative statements without quantifying or supporting them in any way. (You call their reason an "excuse" and label that excuse as "feeble", without telling us why we should think it is feeble and what would make it valid in your eyes. It seems we are to believe it is a "feeble excuse" merely because you claim it.) Second... no, that's pretty much it.

I don't know whether the Brits are right or not. I just know what they are telling the world, and commented that the article recently cited on this topic notably lacked any reference to this fairly important point.

Scrat -- Before you leap, try to understand something: This administration (and, by infection, some of Mr. Blair's cabinet members) uses the trick of asserting something untrue and then challenging their critics to prove a negative. ("Show me there are no WMD's!") They know -- because this is the kind of stuff Karl Rove banks on -- that there are members of the American public, yourself included -- who fall for this.

How and why you let yourself get snookered is your problem, but please don't use the same tactic here in A2K. It's a fad. But it's a dangerous one. It makes you a co-liar. Go back and read what happened to people who blindly believed in Nixon and see if you really want to wind up that way.

scrat

For goodness sake, read some brit press and get more information on the story. The Brits say "we have this intel from a country who we can't mention (known to be Morocco) and it would be bad manners to share any of this with anybody". How more feeble do you want?

According to one of the news for today, this administration people are claiming they are closer to proving WMD's. We'll have to wait and see. c.i.

Blatham - For goodness sake, don't get your panties in a wad, man! Chin up, I say! :wink:

I think you are well read enough to know the reason given for withholding the source. If the Brits reveal it, they undo years of intelligence sharing agreements. They aren't claiming to be withholding it by choice, but at the request of the government that shared it with them. (Again, this I suspect you know and understand.) That you think this is a "feeble excuse" doesn't mean anything. Can you offer me evidence that the agreement they claim--that they can't reveal the source if those who gave it to them don't want it revealed--is untrue? That would go a long way to making your "feeble" claim mean something.

BTW, you seem to be pretending that I have argued that their claim is true. I have not. I pointed out that they made it. Period. You seem to believe it is false, but offer no reason for that belief other than (seemingly) the fact that you hold that belief.

From Alexander Cockburn, FYI, at creators.com:

RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 2003

WANT TO MEET THE REAL WMD FABRICATOR? YUP, A MILD-MANNERED SWEDE

Week after week, Bush and his people have been getting pounded by newly emboldened Democrats and liberal pundits for having exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his still-elusive weapons of mass destruction. One day, CIA Director George Tenet is hung out to dry; the next, it's the turn of Paul Wolfowitz's team of mad Straussians. On the other side of the Atlantic, the same sort of thing has been happening to Tony Blair.

They deserve the pounding, but if we're to be fair, there's an even more deserving target, a man of impeccable liberal credentials, well-respected in the sort of confabs attended by New Labor and espousers of the Third Way. I give you Rolf Ekeus, former Swedish ambassador to the United States and, before that, the executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq from 1991 to 1997. These days, he's chairman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a noted dovecote of the olive branch set.

In the wake of the first Iraq war, it was UNSCOM Chief Ekeus, exuding disinterested integrity as only a Swede can, who insisted that Saddam Hussein was surely pressing forward with the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. It was Ekeus who played a pivotal role in justifying the continued imposition of sanctions, on the grounds that these sanctions were essential as a means of applying pressure to the tyrant in Baghdad.

In 1996, Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, and a leading critic of the indiscriminate cruelty of these sanctions, wrote an open letter to Ekeus beginning thus: "Dear Mr. Ekeus, How many children are you willing to let die while you search for 'items' you 'are convinced still exist in' Iraq? Every two months for the past half year, and on earlier occasions, you or your office have made some statement several weeks before the Security Council considers sanctions against Iraq which you know will be used to cause their continuation … This cruel and endless hoax of new disclosures every two months must stop. The direct consequence of your statements which are used to justify continuation of the sanctions against Iraq is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent and helpless infants, children and elderly, and chronically ill human beings."

Despite many such furious denunciations, till the day he handed over his job as UNSCOM chief to the more obviously suspect and disheveled Australian, Richard Butler, Ekeus continued in the manner stigmatized by Clark and others. It was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Madeline Albright, who notoriously said to Lesley Stahl of CBS, of the lethal sanctions that killed over half a million Iraqi children, "we think the price is worth it," but it was Ekeus who furnished the U.N. diplomatic cover for that terrible calculus.

It's fortunate for Ekeus's reputation among the genteel liberal crowd that public awareness of what he really knew about Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons is still slight. In fact, Ekeus was perfectly well aware from the mid-1990s on that Saddam Hussein had no such weapons of mass destruction. They had all been destroyed years earlier, after the first Gulf War.

Ekeus learned this on the night of August 22, 1995, in Amman, from the lips of General Hussein Kamal, who had just defected from Iraq, along with some of his senior military aides. Kamal was Saddam's son-in-law and had been in overall charge of all programs for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

That night, in three hours of detailed questioning from Ekeus and two technical experts, Kamal was detailed and categorical. The U.N. inspection teams had done a good job. When Saddam was finally persuaded that failure to dispose of the relevant weapons systems would have very serious consequences, he issued the order, and Kamal carried it out. As he told Ekeus that night, "All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed." (The UNSCOM record of the session can be viewed at http://www.fair.org/press-releases/Kamal.pdf). In similar debriefings that August he said the same thing to teams from the CIA and MI6. His military aides provided a wealth of corroborative details. Then, the following year, Kamal was lured back to Iraq and at once executed.

Did Ekeus immediately proclaim victory and suggest that sanctions could be abated? As we have seen, he did not. In fact, he urged that they be intensified. The years rolled by, and Iraqi children by the thousands wasted and died. The war party thumped the drum over Saddam's WMDs, and Kamal's debriefings stayed under lock and key. Finally, John Barry of Newsweek unearthed details of those sessions in Amman, and in February of this year, Newsweek ran his story, though not with the play it deserved. I gather that when Barry confronted Ekeus with details of the suppressed briefing, Ekeus was stricken. Barry's sensational disclosure was mostly ignored.

And Ekeus's rationale for suppressing the disclosures of Kamal and his aides? He claims that the plan was to bluff Saddam and his scientists into further disclosures. Try to figure that out.

For playing the game, the way the United States desired it to be played, Ekeus got his rewards: a pleasing welcome in Washington when he arrived there as Swedish ambassador, respectful audiences along the world's diplomatic circuits. To this day he zealously burnishes his "credibility" with long, tendentious articles arguing that Bush and Blair had it right. He betrays no sign of being troubled by his horrible role. He will never be forced to squirm in hearings by Democratic senators suddenly as brave as lions. He won't have to sit in a hospital in Baghdad watching children die or ride in a Humvee and wait for someone to drop a hand grenade off a bridge on top of him.

Today, he grazes peacefully in the tranquil pastures of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute. But if we're going to heap recriminations on Bush and Blair and the propagandists who fashioned their lies, don't forget Ekeus. He played a worse role than most of them, under the blue flag of the United Nations.

* * * * *
If you are strong enough to take the realities and outcomes of war, and just want to refresh your memory, you might want to check out the 1988 Japanese anime film, Grave of the Fireflies. Available on tape.

Tart - A very interesting citation. Thanks for sharing it.

I have a couple of comments/questions regarding it. (I'm not anticipating an answer to these, just commenting as to what my thoughts on the citation are.)

1) If Saddam actually ordered the destruction of all WMDs and same was in fact carried out, why would Saddam hide that fact from the world? What did he have to gain by continuing to bluster, block inspections and shake his finger at the world if he had in fact done what was asked of him? All he had to do was march inspectors around, show them what he had, let them watch it being destroyed, and get on with his reign of terror over the people of Iraq in peace. (Peace for Saddam, not the people of Iraq, of course.)

2) Whether Saddam actually destroyed WMDs and then refused to offer evidence that he had, or refused to do so, it was he who kept his people suffering under UN sanctions, not the UN, the US or anyone else. If I commit a crime and am sentenced to 10 years in prison, would you argue that the penal system is keeping my children in poverty because I am locked up and can't get a job and provide for my family, or would you recognize that it was my actions and choices that caused their hardship?

Anyhow, those were my thoughts while reading the text you cited. Thanks for sharing it, as this was the first I had heard of this information.

I think you need to reread the article about Ekeus, Scrat.

Now -- a reason why we've got to get very serious about dumping Republicans. It's not enough to dump this administration. The economic consequences of their political games are laid out skillfully in Krugman's latest op-ed piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/01/opinion/01KRUG.html

Scrat, Here's a possible scenario why the WMD's could have been destroyed, but ordered not by Saddam but somebody of authority. Since Saddam's underlings destroyed them without Saddam's approval, they wanted to 'hide' that fact from the big boss. Everybody working for Saddam had to hedge their bets that Saddam would never find out. Since nobody could admit the WMD's were destroyed, Saddam and the whole world were fooled into thinking Iraq still had them weapons. c.i.

I repeat (from the above article):

...Saddam Hussein had no such weapons of mass destruction. They had all been destroyed years earlier, after the first Gulf War.

Ekeus learned this on the night of August 22, 1995, in Amman, from the lips of General Hussein Kamal, who had just defected from Iraq, along with some of his senior military aides. Kamal was Saddam's son-in-law and had been in overall charge of all programs for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

That night, in three hours of detailed questioning from Ekeus and two technical experts, Kamal was detailed and categorical. The U.N. inspection teams had done a good job. When Saddam was finally persuaded that failure to dispose of the relevant weapons systems would have very serious consequences, he issued the order, and Kamal carried it out. As he told Ekeus that night, "All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed." (The UNSCOM record of the session can be viewed at http://www.fair.org/press-releases/Kamal.pdf).

Tartar, Considering the fact that neither UN Inspectors or the US Army can not find those WMD's, it's possible that this transcript is true. I still have a tinge of skepticism about trusting one individual from the hiararchy of Iraq to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. It's probably a 50/50 toss up situation now. The only question that remains is how GWBush and his administration were able to claim they knew the locations of where those WMD's were hidden. c.i.

Ah, but C.I., doesn't the pentagon and the administration say - repeatedly - that they will be able to get the true information after they have spoken to the Iraqis involved? And didn't they also claim that the involved Iraqis were too afraid of retribution to talk to them? So, apparently the Bush people trust the Iraqis enough to take their word for whatever information may come their way - although, so far, they haven't gotten any.

And isn't that a good question about the sure knowledge of the whereabouts of all those places with WMDs? I can even picture Colin Powell so earnestly sitting at the table at the U.N., shoving papers around, and saying they KNEW these locations. (Although they never saw fit to give this information to the U.N. inspectors.)

Another speculation about how well the Iraqi post-war is going. Why would the WH ask James Baker, the fierce fixer-upper, to go and lead the charge in Iraq, only to have Baker decline a day later? Is the situation perhaps far more difficult to fix?

And an interesting little item from Slate, taken from a recent issue of Stars and Stripes...no more embedment of reporters there. As a matter of fact, no more reporters. Only when they're asked to report on pre-arranged stuff. This comes after the comments of various military over there to the effect that some have their own decks of cards - with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush on them. Can't have any complaints showing

What, exactly, kind of war was this supposed to be? And what signifies winning it?

What will signify winning it is when this administration inplants a new government in Iraq - for the Iraqi People. c.i.

"Why would Hussein destroy his WMD, then obstruct inspectors in 2002?"
Perhaps because he wished to retain an appearance of strength in the eyes if Iran. Just a thought.
The whole situation has been tres bizarre since 2002.There is little doubt in my mind that the administration intended to go to war from the moment they siezed power. The fact that the key members of the PNAC think-tank are all presidential advisors confirms this. But the fact that the American people have happily acquiesced boggles my mind! Two weeks ago, when Bush blithely stated "Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors in," with Kofi Annan sitting beside him I waited for some sort of response in the media, but there was nothing. One begins to wonder if the American public isn't in some sort of self-induced trance?

But, judging from history, the US will not allow an Iraqi government that is not in lockstep with the US. In short, another dictatorship.

CI -- It seems very obvious to me. But even given your doubts, it shows that the administration had serious indications that there were no WMD's and yet went ahead to prevent the inspectors from continuing their search and then denied that there was any information that the weapons had been destroyed.

There was no hint of doubt in any pre-war statement from the admin. If you believe, as I do, that not telling the whole truth is lying, then there is no doubt that the admin is lying. (And many of us believe they actively lied, as is being borne out in the "16 words" mess. Why on earth are we obligated to choose between two known liars -- Bush and Saddam?)

Liars and tyrants -

An interesting theory. I guess I can see that, though if this were true, why would those people not have come forward with that information now?

Scrat

And if Carl Rove would deny that, as a young man he'd had sex with farm animals, could you offer me evidence that his denial was truthful? Could you offer up evidence showing the claim that Mossad was behind 9-11 to be untrue? Your argument here - and it's one you use continually - is foolish because it is almost always unfruitful. How many things can you PROVE beyond doubt? In jurisprudence, as in science, dead certain knowledge is almost never the case. Judges and scientists, like political subjects, must all operate by gathering as much information as they can, assessing consistencies or inconsistencies, considering vested interests which might sway testimony, weighing the credibility of the stories told or the data entered, and then sorting out probabilities. The sort of certainty you suggest ought to be the criterion for a claim to be made will be found in the head of believing theists and believing citizen-sheep - those who are so simple and weak-minded that they cannot easily tolerate ambiguity.

Do you know of some tradition - some extensive list of other instances - where Britain and the US and some third nation have followed such an intelligence sharing/witholding protocol on a matter as important as this? I sure don't. So it seems not so likely just on that point alone. Then, toss in the observation that if the US and Brits can get away with stonewalling this information, the status quo (of retaining power) is more likely to be preserved, and you have another tip of the scales pointing towards purposeful deceit. Add the history of fibs and half-truths and outright falsehoods from the administration, and only advanced skull-numbness protects against acknowledgement of what the probability is.

Blatham -- Re intelligence sharing: Pop over and take a look at BumbleBeeBoogie's interesting post: http://able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10089&start=10