It seems like a repeat of what has been said in here before in other threads. Old chemical weapons left over from the Iran/Iraq war; which were not the WMDs the United States went to war over.
Or as this story put it:
"All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.
In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war's outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find." -end snip
I dunno if you bee to Iraq, but old weapons can, still and are used regardless of when they were made. They can be used and are used to this day in that country.
If these are chemical weapons that can cause large numbers of deaths (in their prime state, of course), these are ****ing WMDs.
What's there to debate?
Regardless, the Bush Administration had shitty intel and we know for a fact that based on that intel, Iraq didn't have WMDs (regardless of whether or not they did, we didn't have the proper intel to prove that).
So the debate is not really about Iraq actually having WMDs, it was the intel we used to justify the invasion of a sovereign nation that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of INNOCENT citizens! The older I get, the more angry this makes me (because they were innocent...women, children, parents, etc.). Man, this makes me sad. I'll stay out of this thread.
Because the United States was essentially a blind squirrel finding a different sort of nut. Now I won't argue about the merits or demerits of toppling Hussein but the whole legitimization of going there in the first place were based on lies.
There is a fundamental difference between the old, inoperable chemical weapons leftover from the Iraq war with Iran, and the active, imaginary WMD stockpiles Bush used as a rationale for war.
"The existence of aging chemical weapons in Iraq was never the justification for Bush’s invasion, nor was it a secret. The secret was the harm that they were causing to U.S. troops and the subsequent failure to care for these individuals."
So what? Who cares? It is totally irrelevant to the issue at hand.
These are not the WMD stockpiles on which the Bush administration made its case for invading Iraq.
These are chemical weapons leftover from Iraq's war with Iran. We have been aware of this particular stockpile since 1991.
The issue that is the subject of the New York Times article is that the military concealed that soldiers were exposed to these weapons during the second war in Iraq and not given adequate treatment.
I agree with you and understand that, but I still think differentiating between "these" and "those" is a bit brash. Weapons were used and they still can be.
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Gender: Unspecified Location: With Cinderella and the 9 Dwarves
From TI's source
So yes, seems like both sides have to apologize, Democratic supporters that said there were no old WMDs at all, and supporters of the Bush administration that denied that the Bush administration lied knowingly to the American public to involve them in a war of aggression. TI proved both of those facts.
I guess you yourself have to judge which one is worse.
KMC Community Forums
Oct 15th, 2014 10:47 PM
