Clinton believed Iraq had WMD

wow you people go on speculation alot dont ya?




the UN inspectors were given 12 years lol,besides the UN inspectors NEVER would have found anything.

we found a whole friggin air force hidden under the sand,its not hard to hide a bunch of mortar shells and such the same way.

also,i know that everyone likes to ignore this bit and think otherwise but IT WAS NOT THE INSPECTORS JOB TO LOOK FOR WMD.

they were supposed to only go over there to oversee their destruction,saddam was supposed to give them up himself.
not to mention iraqi officials always had hours of advance notice atleast of which sites the inspectors were headed to.

now add to that the fact that his wmd programs was built to be mobile,its easy to se why the inspectors didnt find anything at all.



during peace time soldier suicides are at about 10 per 100,000,during our occuation that's risen to about 12,not a huge rise at all.

i've also talked to a service veteran who was around for a few dozen suicides while overseas,out of ALL of them only 1 was NOT related to the guy getting dumped by his girlfriend/wife while he is gone.

so blame the women for the suicides lol.




sitting ducks?

our troops are attacked between 30 and 60 times a DAY,every day we capture/kill around 70 insurgents,we lose not even 1 man a day out of the few hundred thousand we have over there.

damn our guys are good.

we also have the msot well funded and equipped military in the world by far,our guys are issued what their supposed to be issued based on their unit/mission.

and dont go and tell me you know better then a century of combat doctrine?

as for food im sure they have all they need, and the folks at home are always sending huge amounts,so i dot know where these reports of thme running out are coming from.

not to mention they can buy food...iraq isnt some 3rd world desert,there is plenty of food available for purchase.



there si no evidence of him actually deserting his post,
the democrats wouldve been all over that for one thing lol.

there was some explanation given for this awhile back i read but this was months ago and i dont save links lol.


you guys dont give our troops enough credit.

they've overturned a brutal regime and have lost less men then we lose EVERY YEAR in training accidents.

in both world wars it was not uncommon to lose 400+ soldiers in 1 day.

our troops have done an outstanding job and have achieved an overwhelming victory with minimal casualties and minimal civilian loss.

personally i could'nt give less of a damn wether we ever find WMD the good that has come from this is enough.
not to mention the major blow it is to terrorists saddam was supporting heavily.

one less hiding place for alqaeda lol.

Chaunsey, I just wanted to add that for MONTHS after the Germans surrendered in 1945 we were losing a substantial number of troops to German booby traps and sniper attacks. Also, during this past summer, we lost an unbelieveable lot of guys who drowned swimming in the rivers after being TOLD about the dangerous currents and observing that no matter how hot it got the Iraquis NEVER swim in the Tigris. I view some of the deaths over there more as natural selection than tragedies.

Exactly what the hell ARE you smoking?

The UN inspectors had found that while Iraq resisted them, they complied. They occasionally had to be bullied into compliance, but they complied. And lo and behold.... no WMD.



Got a source on this? While you're at it do you have a source on how such an air force would even be functional? (Psst. Airplanes don't like being buried....)



Funny.... all we've found is two trucks. Inspected for biochem weapons production. Found? Nothing. What a shock.



Bush went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in 1973. This is a matter of public record. It's also desertion.

You don't just 'forget to show up' for military service for a year or more. Unless you're stoned. And you don't get out of being court-martialed for it. Unless daddy's a Senator.



You're aware that bin Laden and Hussein loathe each other? As in 'shoot on sight' loathe each other? As in 'bin Laden declared a fatwah on Iraq because of their secular goverment' loathe each other?

But yup! Al-Quaeda is all over Iraq. Of course the people we suspect they're hiding with are our allies against Hussein.... but hey! At least we're kicking some ass! Right?

Here is a link to a series of photos of one hidden Iraqi fighter being excavated from the desert, where it had been buried by the Iraquis. We ultimately recovered seven or eight Iraqi planes that had been hidden in a similar fashion. Most of their remaining operational air force, in fact.

http://www.defenselink.mil/photos/AUG2003/030706-F-0000C-906.html

Several non-proscribed fighters that would have had to have been completely disassembled, cleaned and repaired for them to have even had a HOPE of getting airborne again?

This impresses you as dangerous somehow?

lol,thanks for the link david


as for bush,there is no evidence he went awol,there is only 1 years missing paperwork to go on.

and again,if this were atall feasable it wouldve been allover the news in the 2000 election and it wouldve come up many times over the past few years aswell.

the links between saddam and alqaeda are already rpoven fact,bin laden is not the only person in alqaeda,it is made up of many many loosely connected cells,some more or less connected then others.

i do have a few links for this one lol.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/378fmxyz.asp

hmmm the second link i have seems to be dead,dunno what happened,maybe ive got the wrong one.

i never said it was dangerous,any one of our fighters is easily capable of killing all of those ones before they even have a shot.

the point is if they can hide this from us,its concievable,and it makes more sense,that saddam had his WMD buried out in some desert area.

and witout any tips i dont see us going and digging up the whole desert lol.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3540586/

There's a link from an actual news link, (not the frothing right wing bias of the Weekly Standard... which is almost as bad as the Free Republic.)

The 'leaked memo' that story is based on is universally regarded as misquoted by the intelligence community, and is largely disregarded as making no new points, and being wrong on many of the points it DOES make.

That's all you've got?

Thing is, even if that were true.... you have several problems to deal with.

1) Assuming, for the sake of argument, that you're right.... any biochem weapon delivery system would be just as useless as those fighters. (Burying anything with moving parts is generally a bad idea.)

2) You're assuming the Iraqis were suicidal enough to bury extremely toxic and contagious weapons in the desert. Where it could leech into the water supply. (Such as it is.)

3) If we had credible intelligence as to the existance of such claims.... wouldn't we have had at least a vague idea of where they were hidden? The administration likes to make this out to be some needle in a haystack hunt.... but in reality, any intelligence would have at least SOME general indication of where they were hidden.

1)they wouldnt ust outright bury it,burying it in a container or wrapped in a protective coat to keep sand out would do the trick.

2)first off saddam couldnt give less of a damn how many of his people he kills,second a chemical shell or sometthing would not leak,they are completely sealed and such so there would be no leaking,and anyway burying it far out in the desert away from any water source would prevent that if even possible.

3)we recently found a cache of old mortar shells buries under a remote marsh,a local iraqi claims ot have helped bury them 3 years ago.
the shells were wrapped in plastic to protect them.
the liquid inside tested negative for blister agents but there were traces of chemicals detected on the shells.
these are believed to have been gas shells from the iran/iraq war.
it seems saddam had a habit for burying things our in the middle of nowhere

these shells are still nothing but with time lets see what comes up.
my guess is one day years from now when iraq is settled down and our troops are mostly gone someone is gonna uncover something.

its just not likely for us to find something hidden somewhere in an area the size of california or so if we have no leads about it.

but again regardless of wether we find em or not i agree with the war,and really so does america.

if saddam were a nice guy and his people were not suffering and congress tried to make the case for war based only on WMD america would never have support a war.

Neutral question. Is it possible that those shells were of American origin? We did support Saddam during the Iran/Iraq war, and we stood by him pretty much up until he invaded Kuwait.

I don't give our troops credit? Where did I ever say anything about the troops that gave you that idea? I'm saying this administation is giving our young men and women lipservice instead of equipment. He happily spent millions on photo ops to grease his own wheels while our troops sit without the proper basics. The stress of that sure would raise suicide rates.

(from MSNBC Jan 14, 2004) "The Army’s suicide rate in Iraq has been about a third higher than past rates for troops during peacetime, the Pentagon’s top doctor said Wednesday."

I fully sopport our troops. I want to see them with what they need to stay alive and come home.

That's an interesting news quote. What past rates? Isn't that to be expected after a large troop deployment? Surely Iraq is more stressful than hanging around friendly bases during peacetime. I don't know if this is a perfect example or not, but this may be an example of the kind of crap some media pulls that makes people call them biased. The news media lives off of feeding doom and gloom to people, and focusing on the bad much more than the good.



Okay...so it's increased by just under "a third" compared to the last two years. But wait...



Where are they getting their numbers and conclusions from? Maybe more importantly...do they even mean anything? If they quoted the Pentagon's "top doctor" (who?) why wasn't the original quote IN quotes? Did they reword what he said and somehow create a different implied meaning? Maybe there are legitimate answers to those questions, but I'm not just going to take someone's word for it.

I'm not saying the troops are or aren't undersupplied. I doubt there's a *chronic* supply problem but I really haven't looked into it so I won't say anything about that. But...I don't think I agree with the conclusions the media seems to be drawing here, given what I've seen. (Not sure why they seem to think they should be drawing any conclusions at all, really, but whatever.)

If there is some kind of major undersupply problem....WHERE are all the billions(?) of dollars we are spending on this effort going?

Ask VP Cheney. His former company Halburton won billion dollar supply projects for the troops. Including fuel and food. There HAVE been reported shortages of food, rotten food, and grossly maintained kitchens. (According to the media of course.)

Great point, Garoad. The fact is that there were 8 more suicides than in the previous year. The implication is that troops are unhappier due to being in Iraq. The truth may be quite different (I don't know, but neither do I accept unspoken assumptions). How many romantic breakups? Deaths of loved ones? Economic hardships? Maybe the suicide rate would have been higher if those troops were not in active duty?




Where have you been, Garoad? Everyone knows that those billions are going to fund UFO research at Area 51.

No, hiding a few old Russian fighter planes (one of which I have seen myself in Aberdeen, MD - where it is being refurbished for the future Iraqi Air Force - so it is by no means ruined by being hidden in the sand) that doesn't impress me much, but it does make me think that the desert is a good place to hide things, and Iraq has a damn lot of desert. It is claimed that the anthrax, et c the Iraqis cultured years ago was all dumped out. Maybe it was, but there is just as good a chance that some of it is also buried in the desert or stashed in some safe deposit box.

And remember, the President (no matter who the President is at any given time) has access to a lot of information that you will never see on the 5:00 news. Information that cannot be revealed because to do so might reveal the identity of an informant, or the capabilities of military or intelligence gathering technology, or some other reason. I think that the whole situation could have been handled much better, but that is based on the limited subset of the facts to which I have access.

Things could be worse. We could "find" evidence of WMD and reporter or political campaign would be certain to imply they were just planted by the US to justify its claims.

If I seem a little conservative this week, it is because I watched part of a Ted Koppel report on Iraq last week. He was asking questions such as "How are the troops dealing with the number of deaths since the end of the so-called war?" "What are the troops saying about the increased threat of the past few weeks?" The officer he was interviewing tried to answer politely but accurately - the troops were certainly more vigilant but feeling in particularly more danger than in months past, I wouldn't refer to it as the 'so-called' war, etc. Koppel has sunk to the level of the old joke, "Have you stopped beating your wife, yes or no?" These days, between Al Franken, Rush Limbaugh and the network news anchors (including Fox) I can't decide who sickens and insults my intelligence more.

This link was brought to my attn today. Thought it was worth a view.