kelticwizard wrote:But there were inspectors on the ground, inspecting away, and Bush ordered them out and invaded.
How can you say that Bush cannot be held responsible for there not being WMD's on Iraq when inspectors were there, being allowed the run of the country to look for them, and Bush ordered them out and invaded?
Brandon9000 wrote:God, this is painfully elementary. This had been going on for a dozen years. Hussein had thwarted and misled the inspectors.
Then why put the inspectors in on the eve of war, if Bush had no faith in the inspection process? Are you admitting that Bush did the inspection thing just as a show to throw the UN a bone before invading?
Brandon9000 wrote:There was a certain probability that Hussein had destroyed his weapons despite the fact that he had no evidence of it, and a certain probability that he had not destroyed them. He was uncooperative.
Hold the phone here. There were
two rounds of inspections before Bush invaded.
On the first round, the inspectors were not satisfied that Hussein was cooperating, since the Iraqis had their own men present when scientists were interviewed, etc, which is certain to have an intimidating effect on the people being interviewed. Hans Blix said so in his report to the UN. Blix requested the UN grant him another round of inspections where Iraq was required to give his inspection team complete freedom and cooperation. Over Bush Administration objections, the UN granted this.
In the second round of inspections, the inspectors reported cooperation from the Iraqis, and good progress was reported in accounting for the WMD's. Things were proceeding the way they should have. Then Bush ordered the inspectors out and invaded.
Brandon9000 wrote:If he did have them still and had merely hid them better, and we allowed this process to go on year after year, then at some point he might have completed development, and down the road a million Americans might have died.
How the heck is Saddam Hussein going to deploy any existing weapons, let alone develop new ones, when the country is being crisscrossed by inspectors? Not to mention satellite photos and aerial reconnaissance working in tandem with the inspecotrs. That's ridiculous.
Brandon9000 wrote: Bush could not responsibly risk that possibility. He had given Hussein every chance.
No, he did NOT. The second round of inspections were going smoothly, full cooperation was being given to the inspection team. Now that the inspections were going along the way they should have, Bush put an end to the whole process.
Brandon9000 wrote:The UN would not enforce its declarations. He [Bush] simply had to act against the real possibility of a future in which Hussein was armed with nukes and bioweapons.
That's simply not true. It was pretty much understood that if the second round of inspections were interfered with or if the second round of inspections had found the evidence of WMD's, the troops would be sent in. That is why the UN sanctioned the buildup of troops in Kuwait in the first place.
Let's face it. Bush invaded because the inpectors weren't finding what Bush wanted them to find. Bush, with the full cooperation of the bamboozled press, had the whole country worked up to a fever pitch, certain that we were just weeks away from poison clouds enveloping whole states, and Bush wasn't about to let fact finding missions break his momentum. So out go the inspectors, and in go the troops.
Remember Hans Blix's report to the UN in response to Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech? He took Powell and the Administration's fabrications and distortions apart peiece by piece.
You might recall the photos Powell showed where the trucks were leaving an Iraqi factory, and another photo where the inspection team was just arriving over the horizon. Powell said that this showed the WMD's were being transported out of the factory just minutes before the inspection team arrived. Blix pointed out that the photos were taken
weeks apart, not minutes, as the time stamp clearly showed! Moreover, the factory was on the list the Iraqis provided, it was inspected, there were no WMD's there even before Powell's photos were taken.
It was complete chicanery on the part of Powell and the Administration, and Blix called them on it.
