SsgtC
Banned
I believe Thorr97 was saying that Saddam didn't use all his chemical weapons against Iran or the Kurds.
WI: Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs
- Thread starter darklordoftech
- Start date
Al-Qaeda existed in Iraq in 2002, but it was ruled by a relatively hapless Egyptian known as al-Masri.
Zarqawi ended up soaking up the fundamentalist Iraqi Baathists, Salafists who were jailed in Saddam’s reign and the large bulk of foreign fighters so Bin Laden had to make up with Zarqawi to have a real presence in the war once that happened AQI was born.
Come mid 2004 Monotheism and Jihad was an insurgency and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria were a collection of terror cells that were merged into the larger group to officially create AQI which changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq a few years later.
Al-Masri took over the Islamic State of Iraq mid to late last decade for a few years, but he wasn’t charismatic and he died an ineffectual almost unknown figure.
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It should also be noted that AQI had a lot of ties to the intelligence services of the Assad regime in Syria. Bashar still had the nerve to flat-out claim "Al-Qaeda doesn't exist, it's a Western invention" in 2004 at the same time as he was sending Al-Qaeda fighters into Iraq.
Mmm no, everything you say Allende did, he did as reaction of the USA backed extreme rigth boicot against his goverment, incluiding creating artificial shortages
Ian_W
Banned
Time for real talk.
Chemical weapons are still in the same niche they were in 1916 -worse than thick smoke for use against actual militaries, still useful for dropping on hostile mountain villages with inadequate anti-air weapons.
Biological weapons are still in the same niche they were in 1250 - theoretically useful, but no one has got them to work. Or explained how we don't get infected with our weapons.
This leaves nukes. Saddam didn't have a working nuke program, or a delivery system.
They got conflated together as scary-sounding 'WMDs' as a propaganda push, because 'Saddam is still the same regional threat unpleasant dime-store Mussolini he was when he was our ally' doesn't have the same ring to it, while 'He doesn't have nukes' makes the US Navy and Army a lot more willing to be in a war against him (cf North Korea, which does have nukes).
So, did Saddam have chemical weapons ? Yes. And the US still has the receipts from when they sold them to him.
The rest of the arsenal ? His nuke program was aspirational at best.
So. Yeah. My local hardware store has stuff that can be turned into chlorine gas. I guess it has WMDs too.
Chemical weapons are still in the same niche they were in 1916 -worse than thick smoke for use against actual militaries, still useful for dropping on hostile mountain villages with inadequate anti-air weapons.
Biological weapons are still in the same niche they were in 1250 - theoretically useful, but no one has got them to work. Or explained how we don't get infected with our weapons.
This leaves nukes. Saddam didn't have a working nuke program, or a delivery system.
They got conflated together as scary-sounding 'WMDs' as a propaganda push, because 'Saddam is still the same regional threat unpleasant dime-store Mussolini he was when he was our ally' doesn't have the same ring to it, while 'He doesn't have nukes' makes the US Navy and Army a lot more willing to be in a war against him (cf North Korea, which does have nukes).
So, did Saddam have chemical weapons ? Yes. And the US still has the receipts from when they sold them to him.
The rest of the arsenal ? His nuke program was aspirational at best.
So. Yeah. My local hardware store has stuff that can be turned into chlorine gas. I guess it has WMDs too.
Puzzle
Donor
If the Iraq War is seen as justified due to WMDs being found one of Obama's big 2008 pluses of being against the Iraq War is gone. He's a talented politician and campaigner, but ultimately it's hard to see him as some fixed point of history. Some former military candidate would be my guess, and after all we've seen from Hillary I don't see her winning ever.
thorr97
Banned
Um, okay...
So it was the US - through its secret mind control rays - that forced Allende into declaring Fidel Castro his hero, into declaring his intent of turning Chile into a Marxist dictatorship just like Cuba, and then to reveal himself as a dictator - just like Fidel - once in power. Right... And that "extreme right boycott" consisted of what, exactly? All the US did was stop its foreign aid payments to Chile once Allende took office. That's what you equate with a "boycott?"
Allende was elected with but 37% of the vote and Chile itself was in very bad economic shape at the time. The divisions within the country were rampant and its economy was already in a shambles. That was before Allende even announced his candidacy. The guy's policies were so utterly incompetent that they of course, only made things worse in Chile.
But I guess that was part of the CIA's master plan, right? First they'd secretly destroy the Chilean economy and set its entire nation against itself so that a smooth talking Communist politician could promise everything to everyone in order to get into power by having the majority of Chileans vote for someone else. And then the CIA would use its secret mind control radio waves to make that Communist behave like every other Communist politician once he's in power.
Um, okay...
thorr97
Banned
Ian_W,
If chemical weapons weren't as abhorrent as you maintain then there'd not be the international prohibitions on their use.
If you think bioweapons are only as dangerous now as they were back in 1250 then you've really not been paying attention to the world.
As to Saddam's not having a working nuke program, that wasn't for his lack of trying. And it certainly wasn't for any change in intent on his part.
Saddam was never "our ally." He was, for a time, "the enemy of our enemy" and thus it was great to see him bleed his power out by bleeding the Iranian's power out as well.
Saddam's chemical weaponry? No, sorry, nice myth you got going on about US sales. The Soviets / Russians were the ones who sold the Iraqis the specialized weaponry they needed to use the chemical weaponry they made themselves. And they made that chemical weaponry using German supplied equipment.
Again, there's a vast difference between mixing up a batch of store bought chemicals in your kitchen in order to produce a gallon or two of "mustard gas" and having the industrialized process at hand to make thousands of gallons of nerve agents. And then to go on with developing and deploying the specialized weapons and infrastructure necessary to use them effectively on the battlefield.
If chemical weapons weren't as abhorrent as you maintain then there'd not be the international prohibitions on their use.
If you think bioweapons are only as dangerous now as they were back in 1250 then you've really not been paying attention to the world.
As to Saddam's not having a working nuke program, that wasn't for his lack of trying. And it certainly wasn't for any change in intent on his part.
Saddam was never "our ally." He was, for a time, "the enemy of our enemy" and thus it was great to see him bleed his power out by bleeding the Iranian's power out as well.
Saddam's chemical weaponry? No, sorry, nice myth you got going on about US sales. The Soviets / Russians were the ones who sold the Iraqis the specialized weaponry they needed to use the chemical weaponry they made themselves. And they made that chemical weaponry using German supplied equipment.
Again, there's a vast difference between mixing up a batch of store bought chemicals in your kitchen in order to produce a gallon or two of "mustard gas" and having the industrialized process at hand to make thousands of gallons of nerve agents. And then to go on with developing and deploying the specialized weapons and infrastructure necessary to use them effectively on the battlefield.
SsgtC
Banned
You do realize that the term "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was coined during the Cold War specifically to refer to Nuclear, Biological and Chemical weapons, right?
The faction of the Chilean Parliament that impeached Allende were center-right Christian Democrats, the leader of which was Allende's predecessor as President of Chile, and said leader was a few years later assassinated via poisoning during surgery for being an opponent of the Pinochet regime. They were not "extreme right." They wanted the military to restore constitutional order by removing Allende and immediately handing over power to a civilian government led by Parliament, not for the military to keep power and establish a junta that went around throwing dissidents out of helicopters.
Interesting fodder for discussion:
A) Iraq moved from accepting dollars to euros for oil
http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/10/30/iraq.un.euro.reut/)
B) Chemical weapon materials were indeed found in Iraq...
(https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ny...and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.amp.html)
C)...as was yellowcake uranium (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-secretly-takes-yellowcake-from-iraq/)
D) Also, missiles exceeding UN specified ranges were known to exist with concerns for others noted (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Samoud_2)
A) Iraq moved from accepting dollars to euros for oil
http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/10/30/iraq.un.euro.reut/)B) Chemical weapon materials were indeed found in Iraq...
(https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ny...and-destroyed-iraqi-chemical-weapons.amp.html)
C)...as was yellowcake uranium (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-secretly-takes-yellowcake-from-iraq/)
D) Also, missiles exceeding UN specified ranges were known to exist with concerns for others noted (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Samoud_2)
Saddam was secular, up until he had to do the veneer of an Islamist due to circumstance post 91...that small amount of time in the grand scheme of things does not mean he wasn't a secularist at heart but rather a pragmatist. And Maliki was a shit copy of Saddam who further created the means by which Daesh could rise.
But to answer the question, Iraq is still a mess because Wolfowitz and co had no way to rebuild the country and the De-Ba'athification process of the CPA would still happen....meaning millions of angry Sunnis
Maliki was no Saddam, he wasn't even a Mubarak, he was Iraq's Nixon whose paranoia and corruption hurt things after we left. But, he was screwed anyway because Iraq needed at minimum a few thousand international advisers to make up for critical deficits in their armed forces while the enemy was rapidly rebuilding in Syria.