News cycles stink.

LoudmouthMormon · Profuse Pontificator

News cycles stink.

arbilad · Head Chef

Yeah, not to mention all the "pesticides" Saddam had that just needed to be mixed with another "pesticide" in a nearby barrel to make a chemical weapon.
Mind you, I'm not a fan of Bush at all, but from the stories I've read it seems pretty clear that Saddam was at least working on weapons of mass destruction.

bokbadok · Senior Bucketkeeper

We know he used them against his own countrymen. He had them, and then he got rid of them. He didn't deny he had them because he wanted Iran to think he had them. This all came out after a native Iraqi speaking CIA agent succeeded in getting Saddam to tell all after his capture.

Cocobeem · Keeper of the Holy Grail

What's that?
Old, beat-up van... probably doesn't even run.
WRONG! That would be a portable weapons lab! D'oh!

Organist · Senior Member

This stuff was under lock and seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency since the 1991 war. They never found any evidence that Saddam was restarting his weapons programs. And since the more recent invasion, we haven't found any evidence of that, either.

If they had found evidence, don't you think the Bush administration would be trumpeting that across the world? That would justify everything and a whole lot of people would be eating crow. There is no way he or his advisors would have let that go.

LoudmouthMormon · Profuse Pontificator

The thing about trumpeting across the world, you gotta have the cooperation of the trumpeters.

So, when we found hundreds of WMD in '06, you got Fox news to run the story, but that was about it.

And finding parts of a centerfuge buried in the garden of one of Saadam's nuclear brains isn't as melodramatic as people would like. No news here.

And finding the mobile weapons lab Coco referred to isn't what people wanted to run on their airwaves for long either.

And finding the meeting notes from Saadam and his top advisors where they discuss the positives and negatives of launching a chemical attack on a few US cities water supplies, well, everyone says stuff. No news here.

And finding the terrorist training camps and bomb-vest making factories, well, they're hardly WMD, right? Who cares about a dozen Israeli women and children anyway - we won't be impressed unless it's something that would at least kill half of New York.

Oh, and the pre-gulf war mass graves? How many thousands of them were there? And the endless stories of human rights abuses, how everyone in Iraq knew at least one friend or family member who dissapeared one night and never came back? Well, all that was done with soldiers and guns - no WMD necessary.

Anyway.

After all we've found, I must admit, it isn't what Saadam was leading the world to believe we'd find. What it comes down to, is we went back in to enforce 1441. See, Saadam agreed to do certain things in order to end the first gulf war, and he was refusing to do those things. He was making another power play which involved lies about how dangerous he was.

LM

arbilad · Head Chef

Not to mention that some of the IEDs that have been used were chemical warheads that uneducated terrorists used as an explosive, not knowing that they had a lot more potential.