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Saddam denied it, Blix and Ritter were sent in and acknowledged there were no traces of any program whatsoever and what had been sealed earlier, was still seale

Saddam denied it, Blix and Ritter were sent in and acknowledged there were no traces of any program whatsoever and what had been sealed earlier, was still sealed.

ethanbond 3y ago
Saddam is a lying autocrat who was making extremely cryptic remarks about WMDs Ritter was last in Iraq in 1998 when he was denied access to several inspection sites. The question was always what happened between 98 and 03. Blix gave his report of no WMDs in June 2003… several months after the invasion which he was deployed into to find WMDs. Again, question was what happened between 98 and 03. So none of this was “obvious” at the time. There were bad decisions, bad information, and straight up liars, but it’s really counterproductive not to assess these decisions honestly in light of the available information of the time.
- the-dude 3y ago
  I had to look up the Blix timeline, and the article I read ( don't have the link on this machine ) says Blix was in months before the invasion and had conclusions about a month before the invasion.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    Yep, he was there and issuing statements & reports before the invasion. His team had to leave because we were about to invade and it wasn’t safe to stay. I truly can’t believe there are still people who buy the lies. They were lying about Afghanistan[1], needlessly because that war had plenty of support, so why would anyone suppose they weren’t lying about Iraq? FFS, half the important people in the admin signed and/or penned published documents advocating that the US look for any excuse to invade Iraq, in the late 90s. It was beyond plain they were bullshitting about the justification. [1] example: the insane GI Joe playset diagrams of massive, secret, advanced underground bunkers they claimed that Al Qaeda had a bunch of, despite it being impossible to carry out that much earthmoving and concrete pouring (let alone buying all that equipment) without giving away the location to everyone with satellites. Tenfold as true if you tried to do that somewhere not right next to a city (because your supply lines for the huge hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars construction project would be even more plain, and the work itself would stick out like a sore thumb). It was clearly a lie.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      No one is claiming that no one lied. I am claiming that the truth was either non-obvious or was controversial. In this case, it was obviously at least controversial. I’m arguing it wasn’t that obvious either. Part of that ambiguity came from lying, part came from Iraq’s track record and secrecy (which of course IMO sovereign nations to some degree have a right to), and part of it came from the usual lack of information that afflicts such adversarial relationships. Anyway you’re right that Blix was there prior to the invasion even though his report didn’t come until after. The report is not nearly as confident as you’re suggesting though. It wasn’t “no weapons,” it was “no evidence of weapons.” We all know, under circumstances less dire and less confusing than these, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I think it’s important not to write these situations off as “well duh they were lying because they’re Bad Guys and we all knew that” because these types of situations will continue to repeat themselves. We need a deeper understanding of what went wrong and how to do it better than “wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along.” It’s actually quite hard to know things, which is why this stuff happens!
      - wharvle 3y ago
        > wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along I was claiming that before the invasion. Because it was. 100% for certain? Of course not. As knowable as anything like that is? Yeah. That the guys who said a couple years earlier we should take any excuse to get rid of Saddam, who were already lying about a popular war (which I was also against, incidentally, for the practical reason that it was gonna be incredibly expensive, far outstripping any benefit, and wouldn’t result in a stable democracy in Afghanistan as the admin claimed it would—go figure) and funneling money their own direction all over the place, might be lying to get their excuse, and more opportunities to loot on a grand scale… yeah, far and away the most likely explanation, and their thin evidence was mostly laughable (I think I may literally have laughed at parts of Powell’s presentation, which was the point at which I gave up hope they had any real evidence) For fuck’s absolute sake, a bunch of these chucklefucks running the show were Iran-Contra alums! Just… wild gestures of exasperation Yes. IT WAS OBVIOUS. And yeah, next time the same thing will happen. That’s just how we operate. We go to war on pretty weak lies every so often. All Iraq did (for me) was hammer home that that hadn’t changed (for some reason I supposed it had?) and, so, probably won’t. That anyone’s still treating that situation as oh so muddy and hard to read just confirms that. We’ll do it again.

Saddam denied it, Blix and Ritter were sent in and acknowledged there were no traces of any program whatsoever and what had been sealed earlier, was still sealed.

ethanbond 3y ago

Saddam is a lying autocrat who was making extremely cryptic remarks about WMDs Ritter was last in Iraq in 1998 when he was denied access to several inspection sites. The question was always what happened between 98 and 03. Blix gave his report of no WMDs in June 2003… several months after the invasion which he was deployed into to find WMDs. Again, question was what happened between 98 and 03. So none of this was “obvious” at the time. There were bad decisions, bad information, and straight up liars, but it’s really counterproductive not to assess these decisions honestly in light of the available information of the time.

the-dude 3y ago
I had to look up the Blix timeline, and the article I read ( don't have the link on this machine ) says Blix was in months before the invasion and had conclusions about a month before the invasion.
- wharvle 3y ago
  Yep, he was there and issuing statements & reports before the invasion. His team had to leave because we were about to invade and it wasn’t safe to stay. I truly can’t believe there are still people who buy the lies. They were lying about Afghanistan[1], needlessly because that war had plenty of support, so why would anyone suppose they weren’t lying about Iraq? FFS, half the important people in the admin signed and/or penned published documents advocating that the US look for any excuse to invade Iraq, in the late 90s. It was beyond plain they were bullshitting about the justification. [1] example: the insane GI Joe playset diagrams of massive, secret, advanced underground bunkers they claimed that Al Qaeda had a bunch of, despite it being impossible to carry out that much earthmoving and concrete pouring (let alone buying all that equipment) without giving away the location to everyone with satellites. Tenfold as true if you tried to do that somewhere not right next to a city (because your supply lines for the huge hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars construction project would be even more plain, and the work itself would stick out like a sore thumb). It was clearly a lie.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    No one is claiming that no one lied. I am claiming that the truth was either non-obvious or was controversial. In this case, it was obviously at least controversial. I’m arguing it wasn’t that obvious either. Part of that ambiguity came from lying, part came from Iraq’s track record and secrecy (which of course IMO sovereign nations to some degree have a right to), and part of it came from the usual lack of information that afflicts such adversarial relationships. Anyway you’re right that Blix was there prior to the invasion even though his report didn’t come until after. The report is not nearly as confident as you’re suggesting though. It wasn’t “no weapons,” it was “no evidence of weapons.” We all know, under circumstances less dire and less confusing than these, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I think it’s important not to write these situations off as “well duh they were lying because they’re Bad Guys and we all knew that” because these types of situations will continue to repeat themselves. We need a deeper understanding of what went wrong and how to do it better than “wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along.” It’s actually quite hard to know things, which is why this stuff happens!
    - wharvle 3y ago
      > wait a few months (or years) then claim it was obviously knowable all along I was claiming that before the invasion. Because it was. 100% for certain? Of course not. As knowable as anything like that is? Yeah. That the guys who said a couple years earlier we should take any excuse to get rid of Saddam, who were already lying about a popular war (which I was also against, incidentally, for the practical reason that it was gonna be incredibly expensive, far outstripping any benefit, and wouldn’t result in a stable democracy in Afghanistan as the admin claimed it would—go figure) and funneling money their own direction all over the place, might be lying to get their excuse, and more opportunities to loot on a grand scale… yeah, far and away the most likely explanation, and their thin evidence was mostly laughable (I think I may literally have laughed at parts of Powell’s presentation, which was the point at which I gave up hope they had any real evidence) For fuck’s absolute sake, a bunch of these chucklefucks running the show were Iran-Contra alums! Just… wild gestures of exasperation Yes. IT WAS OBVIOUS. And yeah, next time the same thing will happen. That’s just how we operate. We go to war on pretty weak lies every so often. All Iraq did (for me) was hammer home that that hadn’t changed (for some reason I supposed it had?) and, so, probably won’t. That anyone’s still treating that situation as oh so muddy and hard to read just confirms that. We’ll do it again.