See post 15.
I took a look and it isne't going to help. You have to keep your claims straight, and then analyze resulting evidence.
Remember the initial claim is that he was a madman capable of and willing to use it, so willing that he posed an imminent threat to us and his neighbors.
You are now arguing that the reason he did not use them during the war to topple his regime, was because that would solidify everyone against him. This conflicts with your original claim for a couple of reasons...
1) If the threat of annihilation, or making the world his enemy, was capable of keeping him from using those weapons during the very war to annihilate him, why would that threat not have kept him from using them at any other time? When would he have been able to use them and not face that same threat (just like N Korea)?
2) Indeed, other than not using nukes, how could this war have been any worse for him? It seems he was in that boat you say he feared without ever using them. Thus if ever there was a time to use them, this war was it, as it couldn't really get any worse. So why would he not use them?
He wasn't stupid enough to use them, but he was stupid enough to fund terrorists and could have/might have already supplied them with NBC weapons.
Again this undercuts your position. If he wasn't "stupid enough" to use them at the final battle for his regime and his own life, when was he ever going to?
And as far as terrorists go, do you know which organizations Iraq helped and what the manner of contributions were? Do you know that as the Iraq War began Tom Ridge announced that chemical weapons in Iraq were unlikely to be used by terrorists in the US because it would be easier and safer for them to just make it here?
Remember the threat of WMDs is that he could use them and wanted to use them and it gave him a strategic hold in the area. A claim that he could sell them to some terrorist groups for use in small incidents is just not the same thing.
And remember OUR FRIENDS ALREADY SOLD THEIR WMD WEAPONS TO TERRORISTS AND TERRORIST STATES! I find it odd that you are arguing this was reason enough to invade Iraq, when our ally already sold all that stuff we said Iraq had and might sell (some of which they didn't even have). Yet we are not invading them? No, we are granting the criminal a pardon and honoring him as a hero while his dictator friend is allowed to rule Pakistan undemocratically. Do you see a problem here?
I'll call your BS on this one. But just so I am clear, before I flame you, are you comparing the US's battle with the insurgents to Saddam's mass graves?
First of all you keep equivocating between the invasion which was against Hussein and the Iraqi army, with the occupation and the fight against insurgents. You should be careful with that as they are not the same thing.
In any case I will take your challenge on the BS issue. First let's define "mass grave". In the case of Iraq it is not simply pulling people in front of a pit and mowing them down (which is what we saw in places like Nazi germany and the Balkans).
In Iraq there were purges to keep Hussein in power, which is exactly like what we are doing now in the case of the insurgents. You may say his insurgents were good people and ours are the bad guys, but in the end the insurgency is the same (and ironically many of the same people as Iran and Syria and Islamic Extremists were continually trying to undermine his rule).
He secured his base by warring on those that physically challenged the legitimacy of his reign and ended up getting buried together in a mass grave. I'm not quite sure what difference it makes exactly how they are buried, rather than why they were killed. You may argue they were killed in a slightly different way, but I am sure Hussein would have availed himself of any more effective method he could have used.
Second, Hussein engaged in open warfare against Iran. Most of the "mass graves" are from that period and represent lots of people who got killed for opposing Iraq, or getting in the way (even accidentally) of his war.
It must be repeated, and you really need to recognize this. Most of the "mass graves" we are talking about are decades old and represent people killed during a time of war, a war which WE SUPPORTED. Those mass graves didn't just materialize after the first Gulf War. Human Rights groups knew about this kind of thing and WE supported him and granted him cover to make more. Our crying about them now is really hypocritical.
But to make matters worse, we are increasing the hypocrisy by continuing to discuss them as reasons why he was bad. They were formed during a period of our support, and now in our invasion to secure our power base we killed many innocent people in mass numbers. There were even mass graves at the time (though some bodies may have been moved to individual graves at this point). We continue to fill graves during the insurgency.
One may claim that he hid his graves, while we do not hide the ones we are making. But this is also not true. Where are the images of the devastation we have created including the mass numbers of graves, and the mass graves during the invasion?
You can always argue that we are better than Hussein's regime, and that I would partly agree with (we certainly have better intentions, though we have yet to see results), but that does not change how graves are filled and their "mass" numbers.
Perhaps you see mass graves, especially ones that we fill versus the ones we simply helped fill at the time, in some different way?
I am open to defining things differently. Currently I do not see much of a difference.
(edited in: You claimed this war was not the last war for Saddam Hussein. I am really wondering how you come to make this claim when the point of the invasion was to remove him from power. What other war was this guy looking forward to that would be more threatening?)
This message has been edited by holmes, 01-17-2005 14:53 AM
holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
"Don't believe I'm taken in by stories I have heard, I just read the Daily News and swear by every word.."(Steely Dan)
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