David Kay, the US’ top weapons inspector in Iraq is stepping down from his post. CIA Director George Tenet has picked former UN inspector Charles Duelfer to finish where Kay left off.
This isn’t a great surprise. Kay had a thankless job. He had to search for weapons in a country bigger than California filled with empty desert and with former Ba’athist officials who were unwilling to talk. The Hussein regime also systematically destroyed documents, murdered witnesses, and systematically dismantled and hid anything that could lead to their WMD programs. Furthermore, Kay did not have the resources he needed because of the need to fight the ongoing insurgency in Iraq.
Duelfer is an interesting choice – he’s a skeptic on the idea of Iraqi WMDs, and wrote in the Washington Post that he believed that Hussein did not keep weapons stocks, but still maintained the ability to rapidly produce WMDs. Duelfer also has significant contacts with Iraqi scientists and Iraq Survey Group members from his time an UNSCOM.
It could be some time before the truth about Iraqi WMDs comes out. They could be hidden in the desert where no one may find them for year – they could be in Syria, or they could have been destroyed before the war. Without the documentation and eyewitnesses needed to find out, it will be a long and difficult search. However, when the world’s intelligence agencies and the UN all agreed that they were unaccounted for, and there is significant circumstantial evidence they did exist. the idea that they were all part of some titanic conspiracy seems very hard to believe.
jay, when you say:
“and there is significant circumstantial evidence they did exist”
do you even have a line, a post (without any foxnews link, thanks), SOMETHING you’re referring to?
If so, why did david Kay resign right after Bush made a statement quoting him?? you want him to suicide just like the british expert to finally believe what he says?
Do you finally realize that no one in the world has any proof of that? Do you realize that hundreds have lost their lives on a big lie?
I think you are hopeless with your blind partisanship. The only reason why someone like David Kay would resign is that what he thinks and says is deformed in political speeches. The supposedly “intelligence” agencies are turned into political agencies. This I do not forgive. The democratic world will not either.
Boston Globe August 8, 2003 – Iraqi soldiers were ordered to use chemical weapons against US troops, but did not have time to do so before they were hit. On November 12, 2002 The New York Times found that Iraq was buying large amounts of atropine – the antidote to nerve gas. British forces located chemical warfare suits abandoned by Iraqi troops during the war.
UN Chief Inspector Richard Butler claimed that he had seen Syrian involvement in covering up Iraqi WMD stockpiles. Later this is confirmed by a Syrian journalist Nizar Niyuuf in De Telegraaf. The locations he indicated do match known Syrian military bases.
So, you have Saddam outfitting his troops to fight with chemical weapons – weapons which you claim he never had. Somehow that does not exactly seem logical. Furthermore, there is nothing even difficult about smuggling out WMDs to Syria – the Iraqi/Syrian border was heavily trafficked with everything from illegal oil shipments to escaping Iraqi soldiers.
Every intelligence agency in the world, including that of France and Germany said that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. So did Iranian Intelligence, MI6, and the UN. So if WMDs were a lie, everyone is a liar.
And now Kay has said that every intelligence agency that said so was wrong. And considering how incestuous the intelligence agencies of the free world are with their information (i.e. what the Brits learn we learn soon enough, same for the Mossad, etc.–the “Sixteen Words” thing, ya know?), all it would take is for the US to decide to press that information that agrees with pre-established misconceptions and ignore that information which goes counter to the conventional wisdom. Which, of course, is why we have neither Iraqi WMDs nor Osama bin Laden in custody.
This is ridiculous. Forget all of this unnecessary sourcing and referencing. A 9th grader provided with even the most elementary facts in this case could see that there never was any imminent threat or WMD about to, as Condi Rice said, leave a mushroom cloud over Manhattan. It was all just propaganda lies, successful ones, bent on making us afraid enough not to take to the streets over this killing people for money scheme the Bush family has perfected.
What about some simple questions like, why did they hide them?
Why didn’t they use them? US troops amassed at the border long enough for them to set up their WMD. Why didn’t they? Especially since Blair claimed they had the capability to launch in 45 minutes.
At this point,if you believe they had them, then you just believe. It’s just cognitive dissonance kicking butt that makes all the conservatives want to believe that their leaders didn’t feed them BS that they ate hook, line and sinker.
I say, grow up and admit you were taken for a ride, and, assuming that together we all could have stopped Bush, thousands of people died because conservatives and weak liberals allowed themselves to believe a ridiculous fairytale.
It has went on long enough, can we stop the gaming now?
Even if Saddam had no WMDs, it would still be unacceptable for any administration to do nothing about this – which is why the Clinton Administration bombed Iraq in 1998.
Furthermore, WMD was only one of the reasons for invading Iraq. Saddam Hussein ruthless murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqs, he was destabilizing the region, he was supporting terrorist groups from Hamas and Hizb’Allah to Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood.
We had a simple choice – either remove Hussein or keep on with a crippling and ineffective sanctions regime that would have killed thousands more Iraqis and would have eventually been dropped, and once that had happened it would only have been a matter of time before he did obtain WMD technology.
A rational view of the choices for dealing with Hussein shows that removing him was the best option available, saving thousands of Iraqi lives and removing a clear and present threat to the stability of the region and the world – and history is showing this to be true.