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badskywalker on 08 August 2024
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BFR said:
badskywalker said:

I mean, it was a war that the US government lied to get the public behind. The main thing remembered about it (to the people I've talked in anyway) is that we were told Sadaam had weapons of mass destruction and had some sort of ties to terrorist organizations (the infamous Prague meeting). The only weapons of mass destruction Sadaam had were outlawed chemical weapons, not the nuclear weapons they had been insinuating, and the Prague meeting at the time was doubted by the CIA as ever having taken place, as well as the FBI finding no evidence of the meeting occuring.

My reply:

1. Yes, Sadaam did possess chemical weapons and had used them in the past.

2. I don't recall any US gov't official saying that Sadaam had nuclear weapons, but that he highly desired them, and his guys were hard at work developing them.

3. Over the course of the war, the US did not find any of the WMDs, including the chemical ones.  Which means, that either his guys destroyed them or sent them to another country like Syria.

Bottom line is that Iraq had and used chemical weapons in the past, at the time of the war, and if the war had never happened, Sadaam could have had his guys restart the chemical weapons production line as well as continue development of nukes, and either used them again or passed them on to his sons.

The world is safer today because Sadaam is dead along with his two sons.  Sadaam was a mad leader, just like Hitler. 

My reply:

1. I acknowledged as such, and the US government did not seem to care that he had used chemical weapons against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, and openly supported Sadaam during the conflict (of course there was the sale of US military equipment through the Iran-Contra affair, but that was relatively little and very late into the war)

2. I meant he was supposedly in the development of them, that is my bad for not being clearer. However, the US government made it sound like he was imminently developing a bomb. We found documents that suggest that Sadaam had given up on his WMD program in the mid 90s. I will acknowledge that I can no longer find these documents, as the US government took them down in 2006, so a pinch of skepticism here is valid.

"We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon" - Dick Cheney (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-sep-09-fg-iraqtalk9-story.html)

"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" - Condoleezza Rice (https://www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/10/wbr.smoking.gun/)

3. It would be extremely hard to destroy all evidence of uranium, and we did actually find some low grade uranium that wouldn't be useful in the construction of a conventional nuclear bomb, but could be used to make a dirty bomb of sorts. 

4. You did not acknowledge how they lied about the Prague affair.

5. It feels like you are justifying the war by how bad a person he was, which doesn't excuse the thousands of Iraqis that died during the war to get one man. Further your list of bad leaders is exclusively US enemies and leaves out some men who have done far worse things. I see little difference between Lukashenko and the leaders of Saudi Arabia.

I also want to point out, just because a country is developing nuclear weapons does not mean the only option is to go to war with that country, the Iran nuclear deal was a good example of how to diplomatically deal with a country that wants nuclear weapons. A further question, why should the US, China, Russia, Pakistan, UK, France, India, and Israel (not confirmed) allowed to have nukes but not other countries? 

Last edited by badskywalker - on 08 August 2024