Quote:
Originally posted by sgtclub
I've posted many articles on both WMDs and the connections, which you summarily dismiss. That's fine. Forget the articles. Every intelligence agency in the world thought they were there and they weren't basing the analysis on Chalabi. Where did they go? I have never heard a satisfactory answer to that question. I doubt they were destoyed, that just doesn't make sense. They are either still there or were moved.
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You've posted articles on things like the mobile vans that were supposed to be WMD labs, but then they turned out to be for artillery spotting balloons. So I'm really not sure what evidence you think there is that's still good.
It turns out that Chalabi's group was feeding bogus intel to countries all over the world, which were sharing it with each other, but protecting their sources. So, yes, a lot of people were basing the analysis on Chalabi, as it turns out. I suspect you get a lot of your information from the circles where the neo-cons are popular, and so they may not be dwelling on these facts. If you really want me to find stories from mainstream media, I will.
And what Gattigap says. We had imperfect information about what was going on in Iraq. Everybody assumed it had chemical weapons because it used them in the 1980s, but they deteriorate over time, and now it appears that the sanctions may have worked, in the sense that Hussein didn't invest in keeping the programs going. It also appears that the nuclear and biological weapons programs were not what we feared.
Not only did we not have human assets there, as Gattigap says, it now appears that our technological intel wasn't as good as we thought. E.g.:
- U.S. experts, for example, still have not been able to determine the meaning of three secretly taped conversations that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell played to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 in making the case for war. Investigators have been unable to identify who was speaking on the tapes or precisely what they were talking about.*
U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short, half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S. intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not there.
LA Times
* This is embarrassing. And this is the best we had?
What I don't understand is why you have such faith that, despite all of the mounting evidence, something will turn up. They may yet find some artillery shells with chemical weapons left over from the Iran-Iraq War. But so what? The threat wasn't there.
Hussein was a secular nationalist, Al Qaeda's real enemy. There's no particularly plausible reason to think that those groups would ally. If you're convinced that you know better than the (bi-partisan) 9/11 commission and experts like Richard Clarke, there's really no talking to you. You should just be clear that you're operating on the basis of a sort of religious faith when you say these things.
