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Originally posted by Spanky
1) I stated what we were arguing about. You have started new subjects that have been beaten to death before. We don't know if Iraq had WMDs when Bush entered office. We know the Clinton administration thought Saddam had them when they left office. If Ricks claims he knows how effective Operation Desert Fox was, or what happened to the WMDs, he is being disengenuous. But we have beaten that to death.
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In other words, because Clinton thought x in 2000, Ricks is lying if he says something different in 2006 on the basis of additional information. We have beaten this to death. You have yet to prove that you know anything about the subject.
We weren't sure that containment was working before the war, although some of us were sufficiently sure of it that we would not have gone to war to find out. Now we know it was.
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2) As far as Operation Desert Fox and David Kay I already gave you a quote from David Kay. On January 23, 2004, David Kay resigned stating that Iraq did not have WMD and that "I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them." As far as I know David Kay never said that Operation Desert Fox eliminated a lot of them or that he said that the WMDs were gone when Bush II entered office. He just said they were gone when our soldiers got there. In fact, one time in an interview with National Public Radio, he said Iraq had been working on weaponizing ricin up until Operation Iraqi Freedom. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion...0209/9john.htm
Other comments by Kay: Kay told National Public Radio that Saddam "had a large number of WMD program-related activities," repeating the awkward phrase used in Kay's interim report last October and repeated in President Bush's State of the Union address. "So there was a WMD program. It was going ahead. It was rudimentary in many areas." Later, he said that Iraq began retooling its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001 but never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya.
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He
told Congress in October 2003 -- which is to say, fairly early in his work, and while he was still working for the administration -- that:
- "We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW production effort. Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant, and BW production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers."
"Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced - if not entirely destroyed - during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections. "
"Despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material. However, Iraq did take steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program."
This is pretty damning stuff, and supports what Ricks says. My recollection is that Kay got much more blunt, and stopped trying to spin everything as supporting the Admininstration's claims, once he left government service.
