OCCOM BILL wrote:Steve, there's a not so subtle difference between wandering around near aimlessly and searching for Bio, Chemical and Nuclear weapons... and insisting on full access to ongoing Uranium Enrichment.
Your argument doesn't chime with what the Bush administration proclaimed in the lead-up to the Iraq war, Bill. Pre-invasion, the Bush admin declared that they exactly knew the location of the biological, chemical and nuclear facilities, and that the Iraqis where merely denying access to those sites.
It was only when the inspectors reported that they had virtually unhindered access to all the Iraqi sites and that they couldn't find evidence for ongoing weapons programmes that the story changed to "The Iraqis Are Moving Around All Their Equipment All The Time" (basically the core argument of Powell's "report" to the UN Security Council).
Of course, post-invasion the story changed once more to "The Iraqis Had Weapons Of Mass Destruction, But Moved Them All To Syria". In fact, I saw conservative posters on A2K posting opinion pieces even claiming the the Iraqi WMD were all in China now.
I really urge you, Bill, to go back to what your government presented to you before the invasion, and compare it to the situation in Iran right now. Again, you're being told with nigh-to complete certainty what is going on in Iran now.
You are making it appear (or maybe even remembering it) as if your government had merely been telling you that "there was a chance" of Iraqis working on WMD programmes or being in possession of facilities or actual weapons.
It was not.
The Bush administration had
knowledge of 65 chemical weapons storage facilities:
Quote:
Let's look at one. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq.
We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells.
Quote:
Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close-up of one of the four chemical bunkers. The two arrows indicate the presence of
sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions. The arrow at the top that says security points to a facility that is the signature item for this kind of bunker. Inside that facility are special guards and special equipment to monitor any leakage that might come out of the bunker.
The Bush administration had
knowledge of ballistic missile sites, and
knowledge about these missiles and missile components being moved:
Quote:
At this ballistic missile site, on November 10,
we saw a cargo truck preparing to move ballistic missile components.
Certainly, a cargo truck preparing to move ballistic missile components looks completely different from an ordinary cargo truck. And, unlike the second one, the first one justifies the invasion of a country.
Quote:
At this ballistic missile facility, again, two days before inspections began, five large cargo trucks appeared along with the truck-mounted crane to move missiles.
We saw this kind of house cleaning at close to 30 sites.
And, of course, the administration had absolute reliable information about the infamous mobile chemical and biological weapons laboratories:
Quote:
Here you see both truck and rail car-mounted mobile factories. The description our sources gave us of the technical features required by such facilities are highly detailed and extremely accurate. As these drawings based on their description show,
we know what the fermenters look like, we know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like. We know how they fit together.
Even when the invading US army finally found these trucks and they turned out to be mobile hydrogen generators,
Bush declared, in an interview on Polish TV:
Quote:THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.
