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He did have WMD (it was supported by USA btw). Most of them had been destroyed or smuggled out of Iraq. We will only find what Saddam forgot to remove. But it doesn't really matter now.

I think he may have had a few things that he wasn't supposed to...

Enough to warrant going to war? I won't open up that can of worms...

I don't think we will ever find very much in the ways of evidence. If they couldn't find it with all of the technology that the weapons inspectors had before the war, I doubt we could find anything now.

If you consider that they don't even really need to find the weapons themselves; just the trace evidence that is left from their production and storage, it seems like it would be a fairly easy task, they can only be made in certain facilities. it isn't like you can have a chemical weapons production plant in a hidden facility in the middle of the desert...It takes a bit of technology and lots of support systems in place to build the scary stuff, which leaves a lot of evidence...

So far we have zilch...

The fact that Bush used the "fact" of saddams WMD to go to war in the first place is going to come back to bite him in the butt in my opinion...

Asking if Saddam HAD WMDs is like asking if the sun rose this morning. Of course; it's not even up for debate.
Now, wether or not he has WMDs now if a bit more controversial. I see no reason why he would be so uncooperative with inspectors and secretive in his activities had he destroyed them. Had he even destroyed MOST of them, I think he would be out waving a flag to call people's attention to his compliance.
Instead, he played cloak and dagger games and constantly taunted the UN and it's member nations. Even if Saddam didn't have WMDs; he WANTED everyone to think that he did (without being so forth-right as to say it in public; an action that would've, no doubt, garaunteed the end of his regime.) That alone is enough for me to believe that action of some sort was nessecary...

And folks, while tearing President Bush a new as... err... rectal cavity, please remember:
Saddam actions before the war could definitely be considered antagonizing, and he did little to nothing to avert the encounter. Perhaps, Saddam HAD weapons of mass destruction at the start of the war and quietly destroyed them in a last ditch attempt to shame the US gov't. Think of it as a big "going out" party...

Saddam murdered a countless amount of human beings. HE is the WMD, regardless of the means in which he did it.

I agree saxcatz.... I back the war because something had to be done. With someone as unpredictable and as dangerous as Saddam... I dont' feel the Government was is in any position to take any chances.... I feel the right thing was done... and now we don't have Saddam to worry about anymore... and I feel that Osama will be caught soon...

On that note... i really don't know what to think about there being a connection between Al Quida and Iraq... but i believe that both are euqally dangerous.

Well...we do know that Saddam certainly had chemical and biological weapons....hell, didn't the US give them to him to start with? I doubt very much he'd have been willing to part with them either...either they're buried somewhere, or they were destroyed in a mad rush before the onset of war.

He definately didn't have nuclear weapons though...I think that claim would be stupid at best....

Side note: The reason Saddam became the 'enemy' all of a sudden after 9/11 is because Bush couldn't find Osama, but still needed a neck in a noose somewhere to keep the prodaganda machine going, and give the US citizens something to feel good about.

Everyone in the free world loves to hate Saddam, and he's a far more media centered figure than the previous nobody of Osama Bin Laden...so who better to go after as a diversion from 9/11, and the failure to catch the people who were responsible for it?

Yes he did! He wiped out a whole Iraqi town with biological weapons.

I dont think the taliban were connected with him he is a control freak who ruled with an iron fist the taliban is totally against the law and rule whoevers is it, they were natural enemies!

If the taliban werent in Iraq before they are now!


At the end of the day he was a lunatic with no humanity he needed stopping!

Well thats my two pennies worth!

It was right to try and find osama and base the war on terrorism on terrorism , it was wrong to attack Iraq . We did not know for sure Sadaam had WMD's , and possibly we never will know . The basis for going to war was mainly on a hunch ... sure , Sadaam may be a bast**d who has prodded the US numerous times but he did not make any threat whatsoever to attack us . Bush then used the term "prempitive Strike" to justify going to war ...that term my freinds , is a very sad and pathetic oximoron . With reasoning like that I should grab a shotgun and shoot every high school bully that might decide to beat me up one day

Not only that , but it went further then just disarming WMD's .

"hey dang .... we can't find any weapons of mass destruction .... well, sadaam's reign sucks anyway so lets put tons of anti sadaam propaganda out and justify overthrowing their governement ! "

I know we would probobly have most likely had to fight Iraq someday , but we were currently not killing each other in mass on a daily basis . What we basically did was invaded and overthrew the Iraqi government . Is that right ? Despite the fact Sadaam was basically an evil dictator , we have no right to invade and change that . I may be glad sadaam is out of power but the means we used to do such a thing were not right .

I seriously doubt that SH had WMD, and if he did I doubt that even he would have used them, because he would have known that if he fired so much as one nuke then he'd have the entire US stockpiles of nuclear warheads (left over from the cold war) landing on his front lawn.

It is a FACT that Saddam had WMD. as pointed out in this thread earlier he used biological weapons on his own people.

Whether or not governments lied to go to war, and whatever the real intentions for going to war were, Saddam waas a thoroughly evil man who's regime slaughtered thousands upon thousands of innocents and it was necassary for him to be removed from power.

Whether the end justified the means is a different matter entirely, and possibly only a question that history will decide on.

Halabja

By Kamal Najmaddin

From Halabja 1988


There are pictures there bit hard to find and they aint pretty, this was also reported in the Guardian newspaper in 1988 and as far as I can tell Iraq was being supported by the west at this time !

If you need to see more pics from this massacre, just do a google image search with the keyword Halabja

ick , so it did happen but funded by the US eh ? Thats even worse ...

Iraq was not supported by the US in this attack . However the U.S. where doing some dodgy deals and trying to dispose of some of it's weapons stockpile by manipulating the market and playing Iran and Iraq off of each other . It was believed that the horrible attack on Halljaba was ordered by Saddam when he discovered what the U.S. was up to .

In case you haven't noticed the war is going on wether we want it or not . All this arguing points isn't helping the soldiers who are comiting suicide at an unprecedented rate or the children of the war who have lost parents or homes. Can we not find a more constructive way to use the forum ?

In reference to my earlier post, I did not mean the west supported the massacre I was merely trying to show that Iraq was not an enemy then and the attack was not a bout of fiction to justify an attack. It was to show why Saddam needed to be removed from his position of power!


I will never forget 9/11 or the many soldiers from various nations who we all owe a debt of gratitude!

terrorism;
The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.


That for me would make Saddam a terrorist! There's the justification.

These people would rather wait until something really BAD happened and THEN do something about it. Then of course, they often operate with the benefit of hindsight!


Oh by the way...have everybody forgotten about what happened to the Kurds?
Oh, of course not, it is alright for Saddam to kill his own people!

Not to change the subject, but I heard on the radio that Bush and Tony Blair had been put forward for the Nobel Peace prize...which is ironic since they started a war

What's next McDonalds getting an award foor services to cows!

Of course there are WMD in Iraq! They're called Apaches, Black Hawks, F-16's, F-15's, Shermans, M-16's, RPG's, Tomahawks, ... Do you really think that if they had them, they would have hidden them somewhere? For what? If Saddam was to be removed from power and Iraq was to be invaded, what difference would it make to leave the supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction intact? Why hide them in Syria? Is this supposed to be a cat and mouse game? "Ok, here they come to invade Syria! Quick, quick, take ours and Saddam's WMD's and hide them in... Iran, before they find them!!"

My personal opinion is that Iraq did have WMDs, but at the moment in the UK there doesn't seem to be many people left who share that opinion.

My reasoning is first, that they did have the capability to use them in the first place, and did so, as in the massacre of the thousands of Kurds. We'd have to be really naive, given that they had that knowledge, that they wouldn't try to build them again. Secondly, the cynics seem to think that it would be easy to uncover the WMDs if they had existed. You can stock enough WMDs to kill the entire population of the world ten times over in the back of a small lorry. Some people seem to think that Saddam would have hidden them behind his sofa or something. He had months to get rid of all the evidence, which could have meant deporting them to Syria, or some top secret underground bunker, that has since had all it's entrances concreted over. The means of manufacturing them could then have been destroyed and the evidence of their destruction presented, as they were several years earlier, when Iraq was first ordered to destroy it's WMD stockpile.

The thing is now that I seriously don't think they ever will be discovered, and the respective Governments of Bush and Blair may well eventually collapse very soon. Certainly the British public as a whole seems to have lost all it's confidence in Tony Blair, and it's only the lack of any serious competition from the other parties, that has kept his nose in front in the opinion polls. There is no doubt, that if the Conservative party wasn't such a shambles, then Blair would lose his position at the next election, and it would have been the lack of support for the war in Iraq that would have been the major reason for that.

At the moment those that are trying to justify the war are making a complete pig's ear of it, and even it's staunchest supporters are beginning to wonder whether it was worth the loss of so many lives.

Personally I think we have all made a much betterr job of justifying it on this board than our bumbling leaders have done.

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Yeah, he had them when he used them against the curds, but that was an internal affair that wasn't worth fighting for, right? Now, Koweit is a tottaly different issue and harbouring terrorists is something that he has only done recently! A menace to the Western world!! Give me a break!!

I vote straight ticket Republican!

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Bush did not "lie", he shared the information that had been provided to him... the providers of that information should be the topic here. The Patriot Act may very well be unconstitutional... and it has outlasted it's usefulness. No argument here. BUT; those who act as if the patriot is stripping any TANGIBLE freedoms from them are over-reacting. Plain and simple.
I would slap you with a wet fish for being ignorant if this were a real conversation.


Saxcatz, do not resort to that kind of language at other forum members, and please do not unneccesarily quote vast chunks of previous posts. IM is pending.