We all know that Saddam intentionally misled us to believe he had WMD's, right?

I think he is trolling. He says that Human Rights Watch and their list of 20,000 names are fake. He says the United Nations are liars. He also now says UK, Sweden, and other countries are also lying. But the thing he says is true (without any proof mind you) is that some secret cabal of USA "neocons" fabricated all of the deaths. I'm going to throw him in the bozo bin on the assumption that he is either a troll or an addled drunkard.

 

Hard evidence like what Iraqi prosecutors claims but never proved? Could be.

Smells like neocon to me.

 

Oh, I am very well aware of that. ANd you can tell that because he really does not read what has been said, he just responds in knee-jerk reaction.

Such as I do not care about "soldier deaths". Say what? Somehow this individual has totally missed the fact that I am in the military myself, and have had friends killed over there.

And as for evidence, they have found and identified roughly 20,000 Kurdish victims in mass graves, and are constantly finding new mass graves all over Iraq. SImply the number of these graves shows the brutality of the government during the time of Saddam. But somehow that is still not enough.

Personally, the mass graves was all I ever needed for justification. All of the rest of the coprolite is simply political nonsense that people use for the ignoring of genocide and mass murder. And I find the apologists to be detestable individuals.

And hence the typical response, because you really have noting of importance to say.

Somebody does not agree with you, that automatically makes them a "neocon".

Heck, Chemical Ali himself got indignant when he was charged with 130,000 deaths, stating that he was responsible for no more then 100,000 deaths.

 

Just like saying I'm so self-absorbed that I only care about myself because I don't agree that Hussein's actions against Kurds in the 1980s justified the US starting a war in 2003 that killed scores of thousands.

20,000? I thought it was 180,000. Are you so self-absorbed that you don't care about anyone but yourself?

Good for you. They found graves of a few hundred. Maybe that was good enough for you to justify a war that caused scores of thousands of lives and 4400 dead Americans and tens of thousands more maimed for life. Not me.

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Thanks for sharing your opinion. I disagree.

Somebody does not agree with you, that automatically makes them a "troll"

Cite to where he stated that, please.

 

Honestly, you talk like children. War is money is 'just business'

http://www.courtfool.info/en_Pipelines_to_9_11.htm

But those in charge now are complete lunatics, our planet is being run by Mad Men and Women.

Iraq was none of our business and look what we have done to those Ancient Lands now. We should all hang our heads in shame that we allowed our weak Governments be bamboozled into Wars in this day and age. We are what are known as Barbarians though in fact The Barbarians of ancients times had far more honor than we could even dream of calling our own.

 

Get of your righteous high horse and zoom back and look at the World as a whole and see who has had the most negative effect on us all in our life times. Look and see who is the real Killer of Hope.

"[American leaders] are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care ... the same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home-the ones who make it back alive-with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things."

William Blum. Killing Hope



http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/KillingHope_page.html

 

Interesting report by a former CIA Iraq analyst on the gassing of kurds. Seems the situation was not as clear cut as our neocon friends here have tried to portray it. What a surprise.

A War Crime or an Act of War?
By STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE

ECHANICSBURG, Pa. - It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.

I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.

In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq.

We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the region.

Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990's there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.

Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades - not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water. Even if America didn't occupy the country, once Mr. Hussein's Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative opportunities would open up for American companies.

All that is needed to get us into war is one clear reason for acting, one that would be generally persuasive. But efforts to link the Iraqis directly to Osama bin Laden have proved inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present debilitated condition - thanks to United Nations sanctions - Iraq's conventional forces threaten no one.

Perhaps the strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that Saddam Hussein has committed human rights atrocities against his people. And the most dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja.

Before we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people the full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports?

Stephen C. Pelletiere is author of "Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Persian Gulf."

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/helms.html

 

An interesting report by an analyst about a single attack. Not about all of the others. And of course we also have known for over a decade that Saddam used chemical weapons against the US military. So I fail to see where you are trying to go with this.

 

If we're so amoral why do we bother trying to spread democracy in places such as the Middle East? Why did we rush in to offer aid and humanitarian assistance EVERY TIME there's a natural disaster ANYWHERE on the globe? Why did President Bush spend so much money and work so hard to try to alleviate the AIDS epidemic in Africa?

It seems SOME people are so busy trying to build a case against the United States they are completely blind to the facts.

You'll never be the sharpest tool in the tool belt with this kind of dismal performance.

You'll just be a tool.

 

60% of the Worlds agricultural Land, so 60% of our food, comes out of Africa now tell me what has happened to the Africans who lived off that Land? They need our Aid? Why? Because at best we have put them on useless reservations at worst just turned them off their Land and purposely sparked off Wars to kill them off and make sure they cannot unit against our Corperate Industrial farmers.

And that so called Aid is a prison, it holds people in chains. The clauses in the contracts of your generosity are wicked..

Aids came from the USA, it is man made, and was 'found' in Africa much much later. It is a WMD.

The USA is the most insidiously evil Empire the World has ever known, I wish it wasn't but it is.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...Ali-Saddams-reviled-cousin.html#ixzz2SUEqSYo5

Not that it matters, because I am sure you are going to reject this as well.

 

Hussein used chemical weapons against the US military? When did he do that?

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http://cns.miis.edu/npr/pdfs/tucker43.pdf

Most of the reasons why I believe this has been covered up is because of what the mandated US response would have been.

The US (as most other nations) has long had the policy that an attack by a WMD is responded to with a WMD. And since the US only possesses a single WMD, that means that the response would have had to be nuclear.

Among those of us of the Gulf War generation, there is no doubt that they were used. The number of times our chemical warfare detectors went off (mandating some units living in the chemical suits for days at a time) as well as Gulf War Syndrome shows that something happened.

And the absence of cases of Gulf War Syndrome after the 2003 invasion also shows something. There was almost no change in the environment between the two invasions.

 

The U.S. De-partment of Defense (DOD) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long insisted that they did not. In a memorandum to Gulf War veterans dated May 25, 1994, Defense Secretary William J. Perry and General John M. Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared, “There is no evidence, classi-fied or unclassified, that indicates that chemical or bio-logical weapons were used in the Persian Gulf.”1

In May 1996, CIA representative Sylvia Copeland testified, “To date, we have no intelligence information that leads us to conclude that Iraq used chemical, biological, or ra-diological weapons.”

Seems pretty definitive to me. If Hussein used chem weapons those agencies would have every incentive to report it.

 

Not if our govt. wanted to prevent an escalation of violence in the region. That statement may seem counter intuitive but, as Mushroom tried to explain to you, the next step would have been the use of OUR WMDS.

Luckily, we have rational people in the military and (in #41's case) the Oval Office.

 

"Our Govt wanted to prevent an escalation of violence in the region."

Was that before or after the Bush administration decided in invade and occupy Iraq?

 

<<<Mod Edit: Personal Attack Removed>>>

Are you really equating the invasion of Iraq with launching nuclear weapons at Iraq?

 

<<<Mod Edit: Response to Personal Attack Removed>>>

Nope.

 

You nailed it/him, Mushroom! That's the way I read it, too!

 

What do you think would have happened if Israel had been left with no other resort but to defend itself against the possible Iraqi WMD's?

Greater violence in the region, maybe?

Hmmm?

 

That would be Israel's problem.

 

Indeed, and how do you think they would have solved it?

 

Because Iriemon hasn't answered your question, allow me the pleasure.

They would have launched a preemptive attack on Iraq and that would have created a greater amount of violence in a larger area of the region as other Arab nations responded to Saddam's call to Islamic duty to defend a fellow Muslim being attacked. ESPECIALLY if the attacker was the hated Israelis.

George W. Bush prevented a larger and more costly war in the region by invading Iraq.

 

Putting aside your the baseless speculation of your claim, it damned sure would have been a lot smaller and less costly for the United States.

 

Nice alternative history.
But in real life, Saddam wasn't hiding the fact that he had no WMDs, he was proclaiming it, he had given the UN weapons inspectors, who he knew were CIA spies, free access to anywhere in Iraq. He had turned over every relevant document in the possession of the Iraqi state.
He had chosen a different path, he wanted to get the sanctions lifted, to get the cash flowing, and to build his power using other methods.
All Bush did was was film a campaign ad, in which 10,000 Americans and a million others died.