Übergeek 바둑이: So I guess the fact that Saddam attacked Kuwait and we were asked to take millitary action against him at the behest of Arabian nations had nothing to do with it, we just used that as an excuse to eventually take control of Iraqs oil. Right.

On a side note, the reason aliens were scooping people up and probling them had to do with the fact that they originally came here for our jobs and our women. But before they could go after our women, they first had to figure out which of us are the women. You see, we all look alike to them. Personally, I think they are all a bunch of imperialist spacists!

: Lemon lyme: I meant probing, not probling.

Probing, as in poking us and making us stick out our tongues and say "aaaaaaaah".

Probing.

Iamon lyme:

> So I guess the fact that Saddam attacked Kuwait and we were asked to take millitary action against him at the behest of Arabian nations had nothing to do with it, we just used that as an excuse to eventually take control of Iraqs oil. Right.

The Gulf War (1991) was approved by the United Nations. Saddam's forces were defeated and sanctions were imposed on Iraq to stop Saddam from acquiring more weapons and invading any of Iraq's neighbors.

Now, the Iraq War (2003) was not backed by the United Nations because the Security Council saw through the web of lies that the USA and the UK were trying to sell. Most members of the Security Council realized that the claims of WMDs in Iraq were false. Colin Powell gave a speech before the UN General Assembly saying that Iraq was a big threat because of its huge stockpiles of WMDs, in particular its biological weapons nuclear weapons programs.

Weapons inspectors, including those sent by the Bush administration, repeatedly serched and found nothing before the war.

Consider for example what weapons inspector Scott Ritter, director of UNSCOM from 1991-1998, said with respect to Iraq's weapons capabilities in June 1999:

"When you ask the question, 'Does Iraq possess militarily viable biological or chemical weapons?' the answer is no! It is a resounding NO. Can Iraq produce today chemical weapons on a meaningful scale? No! Can Iraq produce biological weapons on a meaningful scale? No! Ballistic missiles? No! It is 'no' across the board. So from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq has been disarmed. Iraq today possesses no meaningful weapons of mass destruction capability."

This was 4 years before the war even started and by then Iraq was already disarmed.

Then UNSCOM was replaced by UNMOVIC in 1999.

"UNMOVIC led inspections of alleged chemical and biological facilities in Iraq until shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but did not find any weapons of mass destruction.

Based on its inspections and examinations during this time, UNMOVIC inspectors determined that UNSCOM had successfully dismantled Iraq’s unconventional weapons program during the 1990s."

"Bush later said that the biggest regret of his presidency was "the intelligence failure" in Iraq, while the Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2008 that his administration "misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq". A key CIA informant in Iraq admitted that he lied about his allegations, "then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war"."

Here is more from Scott Ritter:

"We seized the entire records of the Iraqi Nuclear program, especially the administrative records. We got a name of everybody, where they worked, what they did, and the top of the list, Saddam's "Bombmaker" [Which was the title of Hamza's book, and earned the nickname afterwards] was a man named Jafar Dhia Jafar, not Khidir Hamza, an if you go down the list of the senior administrative personnel you will not find Hamza's name in there. In fact, we didn't find his name at all. Because in 1990, he didn't work for the Iraqi Nuclear Program. He had no knowledge of it because he worked as a kickback specialist for Hussein Kamel in the Presidential Palace.

He goes into northern Iraq and meets up with Ahmad Chalabi. He walks in and says, I'm Saddam's "Bombmaker". So they call the CIA and they say, "We know who you are, you're not Saddam's 'Bombmaker', go sell your story to someone else." And he was released, he was rejected by all intelligence services at the time, he's a fraud.

And here we are, someone who the CIA knows is a fraud, the US Government knows is a fraud, is allowed to sit in front of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and give testimony as a expert witness. I got a problem with that, I got a problem with the American media, and I've told them over and over and over again that this man is a documentable fraud, a fake, and yet they allow him to go on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and testify as if he actually knows what he is talking about."

So the government knew that the key CIA informant was a fraud.

"On 23 January 2004, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, resigned his position, stating that he believed WMD stockpiles would not be found in Iraq. "I don't think they existed," commented Kay. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties." In a briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay criticized the pre-war WMD intelligence and the agencies that produced it, saying "It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing." Sometime earlier, CIA director George Tenet had asked David Kay to delay his departure: "If you resign now, it will appear that we don't know what we're doing. That the wheels are coming off."

So the head of the Iraq Survey Group, the agency set up by the American government to find WMDs, resigned because the government wanted him to find WMDs that did not exist.

Considering how many people before and after the war found no WMDs, how can the war be justified? The USA can come out and say that Saddam was a brutal dictator, but for decades the American government has supported and done business with many brutal dictators around the world. However, Saddam never attacked the USA, the links to terrorism were never proven, Iraq's military was weak, and Iraq was contained within its borders.

Then one has to wonder how much money Exxon and Haliburton made from the war. If the war was not about oil, then why did Haliburton make billions from both oil and servicing the military at inflated prices?

Übergeek 바둑이: Connect the dots. If we were really concerned about getting control of oil (anyones oil), then why do we resist drilling for it in our own backyard? Are you suggesting we aren't accessing the oil we are already in control of so that we have an excuse to invade other countries?

Your obsession with oil is like obsession with aliens. You can make a case for U.S. greed for oil, and I can make a case for why aliens are interested in our planet. Mine isn't predicated on looking for any reason to find fault with the U.S., especially when it's obvious that the rest of the world couldn't care less about your concerns if you bothered to apply them equally across the board.. the aliens are equal opportunity invaders.

Iamon lyme: There are some people in the US that think that by taxing the rich, and giving that money to the needy (as a sort of monetary equalization) that such an idea is sustainable in the long run. It's not. And it won't make people equal. Milton Friedman had it right. Only a free enterprize system can help equalize the financial disparity in a country. You take money from the rich and two problems immediately emerge: The rich run out of money and then refuse to work so hard and take so many risks only to have it confiscated by the government to give it to the undeserving who have little ambition in life (except to suck off the hard work of others).

Artful Dodger:
Taxing the rich has never been about monetary equalization but about progressive taxation, and it is sustainable. It won't make people equal and isn't intended to.
Friedman was an effective propagandist, but his theories were never able to explain the great depression.
The free market cannot help equalize financial disparity. Quite the opposite. As taxes and regulations for the wealthy has decreased over the past decades, the middle class has shrunk and the disparity increased dramatically.
It's a fallacy to think either that the wealthy work hard or that those not rich do not. No doubt some of the rich work hard and some of the poor do not.
Few would fall in the category of undeserving that suck off the work of others. Some that do fall into that category are wealthy.
By percentage, more is "confiscated" from the middle and lower classes than the upper class when sales taxes are factored in.

Artful Dodger: You are right, motivation for doing more than most of us are willing to do would fly right out the window. The only reason some people work hard to make their business grow is because it's possible for them to make their business grow. I don't have that kind of drive, but I've done okay working for people like that.

Taking away the incentive for getting ahead is the best way I can think of to kill anyones motivation for getting ahead. I've known guys who refused to work because they didn't want to pay alimony or child support. If some dead beat dads refuse to work because they won't see all the money they earn, then what makes socialists think killing any incentive to work is such a good idea?

I've never been rich or owned my own business, and I've never been hired to work for someone who wasn't in a position to pay me. Actually, I did work for someone like that once. I got talked into working for a short time for someone who couldn't afford to pay me, so as you can imagine that job didn't last very long. He was paying me with stories and explanations and promises, but I can't buy groceries with nothing but a mouthful of words, so it had to end.

The idea that it's not fair for some people to have more than others is nonsense. Not everyone is willing to do what it takes to get ahead. What is not fair is to reward non productivity and penalize productivity. When that happens then everyone suffers, even the people who put themselves in the position to gain the most.. you can't gain much when there is much less being produced to gain.

Iamon lyme: Cain is the man in the debate! You watching?

Artful Dodger: I like Cain. I like anyone who doesn't talk nonsense.

Iamon lyme: Now that Obama's teleprompter is missing, we'll hear a lot of nonsense!

Übergeek 바둑이: So are you disputing the entire info found in the wiileaks?

Not finding a smoking gun doesn't mean there wasn't one. We know there were WMDs. Intelligence suggested that Saddam was trying to get more. But I do suspect that there was a measured effort to find reason to topple Saddam. But it's just a guess on my part. That Saddam was a bad leader is not debatable. He was a killer. But the US is mistaken if they think they can create a Western democracy in an Eastern country. Especially a Muslim country. A huge mistake. All this while Obama has just sent in 100 troops to a South African country to help with the rebellion going on there. Not much has changed in Washington DC. Obama still has in place many of the Bush policies pertaining to the war.


When someone commits suicide, it may say things one way or another. Only the one who took his/her life knows the deeper reason. That man's death COULD say something about the truth but just the fact that he took his own life doesn't REALLY say anything. People take their lives for many reasons. We can only guess why.

Iraq did have WMDs. Did they still have some at the time of the "invasion?" I doubt it. But no one knew with absolute certainty until AFTER.

"What nobody ever talks about is chemical weapons used by the USA in Iraq. The USA used massive amounts of white phosphorus in Fallujah:"

That is meaningless if Saddam had WMD's of his own. What the US has/had isn't the issue.

War sucks. And since the intent in war is to kill, white phosphorus is handy. But likely innocents are being killed this way and in those cases, it should be banned.

Artful Dodger:

> Iraq did have WMDs. Did they still have some at the time of the "invasion?" I doubt it. But no one knew with absolute certainty until AFTER.

But that is the point I was trying to make. They knew BEFORE the war. They were told so by the head of UNSCOM in 1998. Then by UNMOVIC in 1999 and through to the start of the war in 2003. The Bush administration deliberately ignored its own appointed weapons inspectors. They knew the "bombmaker" informant was a fraud, and still pushed him as an authority on WMDs in Iraq. The Bush administration deliberately deceived the American public to justify the war. They "hoped" to find a smoking gun and instead found nothing substantial, as would be expected from years of inspection turning up nothing.

> "What nobody ever talks about is chemical weapons used by the USA in Iraq. The USA used massive amounts of white phosphorus in Fallujah:"
> That is meaningless if Saddam had WMD's of his own. What the US has/had isn't the issue.

Isn't the issue? The USA is invading countries for using chemical weapons, and then it turns around and uses white phosphorus and depleted Uranium. This is being done deliberately. Look at this training video that the American army produced. It clearly identifies the radioactive nature of contamination left behind by depleted uranium. Knowing this fully, the American military is still using a radioactive weapon in the field, exposing not only civilians but also American servicemen in the field:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ML8i3XefHQ

And if anyone doubts what it does, maybe they should see the rise in birth defects in Fallujah:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYBmnw8rgio

> War sucks. And since the intent in war is to kill, white phosphorus is handy. But likely innocents are being killed this way and in those cases, it should be banned.

When will Americans stop and do some soul searching? Talk of freedom and democracy is meaningless if all that an army does is bring death and suffering. Deliberately lying and using false intelligence hardly makes things better. I wonder how many Iraqi children see at what has happened to their country, and then turn around to blame the USA. Then they will grow up hating the USA for bringing a war based on a pipe dream of non-existent WMDs, then seeing their country's wealth pumped out in oil pipelines. Now let's give those kids a reason NOT to become terrorists.