Forum:Iraqi WMD - Fact or propaganda?

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[edit] Iraqi WMD - Fact or propaganda?

The American invasion and occupation of Iraq is no more justified than Iraq's invasion of Kuwait or Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, unless we accept the story that Iraq's supposed arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction" was - or at least could reasonably have been imagined to be - a real threat to the United States that could not have been removed by other means. We could argue that the WMD issue was never more than a pretext for the war, since we know that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the entire neoconservative movement had been calling for regime change long before 9/11, and that the "Downing Street Memo" and other evidence suggests that the decision to invade was independent of the progress of "disarmament". However, the WMD question remains crucial, because the administration's claims were taken seriously in the U.S. by the major media, politicians of both parties, and the general public. Colin Powell's presentation to the UN was alarming and emphatic enough to weaken world rejection of the drive toward war.

We can't know what the key figures in the Bush administration actually believed about Iraqi WMD. It's hard to imagine that they didn't expect something significant to be found, because they made so many unequivocal statements that turned out to be so completely wrong. On the other hand, their well-documented use of intelligence that they must have recognized as unreliable suggests at least a systematic attempt to exaggerate the supposed menace of Saddam. For example, defector Hussein Kamel's description of Iraq's former biological weapons programs was used to build the case for WMD, but Kamel's statement that he had personally overseen the shutdown of those programs and the destruction of the existing weapons after the Gulf War was obviously not helpful to the case, and was omitted.

Reasonable people can disagree about the respective roles of ignorance and deception, and with no universally recognized "smoking guns," there will be no impeachments or war crimes trials. However, claims that evidence found since the invasion proves Iraq's WMD programs really were a threat seem a lot harder to justify. Compaqdrew's blog points to and criticizes an AP article that discusses the surprising level of belief in those claims, and dismisses it as the product of propaganda.

I invite Drew and/or anyone else who still defends the WMD story to show how the available evidence supports the claims that were used to justify the war.Deadplanet 04:40, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The WMD return

The evidence to which Drew's blog piece refers is a presentation by Senator Rick Santorum and Representative Peter Hoekstra of the following unclassified "key points" of a classified document:

-- Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.

-- Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.

-- Pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the black market. Use of these weapons by terrorists or insurgent groups would have implications for Coalition forces in Iraq. The possibility of use outside Iraq cannot be ruled out.

-- The most likely munitions remaining are sarin and mustard-filled projectiles.

-- The purity of the agent inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives, and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal.

-- It has been reported in open press that insurgents and Iraqi groups desire to acquire and use chemical weapons.

Looking at the Santorum-Hoekstra disclosures, it's hard to see how they could be of much interest to anyone. In three years of insurgency and sectarian violence fueled by explosives from Saddam's huge stocks of conventional weapons, no successful examples of the use of chemical rounds have been reported. The Iraq Survey Group had previously noted the existence of the old weapons, and decided that they were unimportant:

While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

However, Senator Santorum obviously disagrees with this assessment of their importance:

Congressman Hoekstra and I are here today to say that we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons. It's a document that was developed by our intelligence community which for the last two and a half months I have been pursuing.

And thanks to the help of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, ultimately he was able to get it in his hands and I was able to look for and look at.

And I think both of us feel very strongly that this is vitally important information that the American public needs to know...

This is an incredibly -- in my mind -- significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false.

The logic appears to be:

1. We said Saddam had a big dangerous WMD program.

2. You said there were no WMDs.

3. But we found WMDs! Ha ha, we were right and you were wrong!

While this may be satisfying to some people in the context of partisan politics, it obviously has nothing to do with the rationale for the war. The big dangerous WMD program, such as it was, had been reduced to junk long before the US invasion.Deadplanet 14:21, 11 August 2006 (UTC)