They had them in '98. What happened to them?

Okay then, you tell me exactly what WMD they had in 1998.

c'mon dude.. they couldn't know he doesn't have any.. they may be starting a war knowing that to the best of their intelligence he doesn't have any.. but no military planner would proceed without factoring it in. I wouldn't believe any country that said they had totally disarmed. Iraq and America not excluded.

get the reciepts from America, Britain and France :)

Chemical, and biological materials and missiles/artillary armed with chemicals. By their own admission they had these and the first round of inspectors were in the process of destroying them but were kicked out before the process was completed. Iraq now claims that they took it upon themselves to destroy the remainder, but do not offer any proof that they have done so. They claim that they also destroyed the paper work of the destruction so they have no paper proof to offer. There would be physical evidence of the destruction but they have not offered any physical evidence. There would be those scientists, engineers and other personell that would have been involved in the destruction but they have not presented these people either. Bottom line is, they had them and 1441 requires that they prove that they no longer have them and their word is not proof. So I repeat the question. What happend to them?

This is utter bullshit.

One reason we fear these guys and their wmd's is because Iraqi's on average are extremely intelligent and educated people.

Before all this shit started in the 80's they were by far one of the more literate arab nations, and Saddam saw to that.

They have the scientists who can create such things, and then you factor into the equation that they also have a crazy man at the helm who has used such a weapon not once...but TWICE!

He has them, they have always had them, and will continue to produce them when possible.

Lets just assume for a moment, for the sake of the argument, that you are correct. Why then, has it taken five years for this to become a public issue.

Sounds to me like a bullshit smokescreen.

Methinks George Bush needs to:

1) Distract the populace from the increasingly ailing domestic economy.
2) Get Iraqi OIL!

It's just that these points and Saddam actually having WMD aren't mutually exclusive.
In the slightest.

No, but if nothing has changed since 1998, why all the fuss now?

i remember 1991 .. same bs. there was all this talk about sadaam's military prowess .. 4th largest in the world and all. fuck em. asses kicked in no time then, and wil be even faster this time bcasue we will use tactical nukes. another thing different now is that we will secure the oil fields first so that fuck wad doesn't burn them again.

what i hate is all this rhetoric about how the iraq army will be tough becasue they are sooo loyal, and well-trained etc.

jeeesus - don't you think the fucking US military is loyal and well trained?

iraq will look like Superman's glass lair soon enough .. then N. Korea can decide if they want some too. the us military capability is vastly underestimated. vastly.

many people of the world thought the raiders would win too.

Would it make a difference to the world if Sadaam had the world's second largest oxygen suppy held hostage instead of the oil?

Now he's holding oil hostage? That's a new one.

Exactly. If Sadaam were to take a match to his oil rigs again everyone would find out exactly what this war is about in a hurry. Then Bush would say we were attacking for environmental protection. I just wonder if some of you only get your news on CNN. Korea is definately more of a threat than Sadaam. Too bad they don't have oil.

For any and all of the reasons commonly stated.. I've never said otherwise.. I would agree or am open to Oil, distraction from the US economy, dual use economics and war as a stimulous to the US economy, lack of catching Bin Laden, keeping 9/11 "fresh" to shore up the thing that gave him his real support, imperialism and denying of french/russian imperialism, blah blah blah as reasons... none of that would change the fact that Saddam probably has the weapons. He's a bad mofo, and no amount of the rest of the world acting better, as bad or worse in foreign policy is going to change that. There is no black and white. Everyone is tainted. Everyone has a vested interest.
As I've said before the real losers in this are the Iraqi people. The amount of civilians that are going to be either killed or displaced is nuts. With no guarantee the US installed leader will be much better, only that he will be compliant to US interests.
They still wear the burqa in Afghanistan.
If only one of those nifty predator drones could take Saddam and his son out.. with swift intervention to fill the vacuum. (intentionally naive, you get the idea though, succeeding in what the CIA has tried but failed at) no thousands of innocent people killed.. no mass creation of possible terrorists. I think the UN estimated about a million people will be left "displaced" by any urban Iraq war.. They aren't going to be thankful they no longer have a roof over their heads and the same countries that create their situation to "free them" aren't going to allow them in as refugees because then they cease being "oppressed by a murderous dictator" and start being "potential terrorists".
Besides Iraqi civilians it's Australian exports that are my other concern.

Most of you are making a big mistake: you assume too much.

The truth is, we don't know what will happen. There are many different possibilities, and not much that we can be sure of.

Maybe the US will win easily. Their technological advantage indeed makes that very likely. But maybe they won't. When preparing for the war, the US military did a large scale simulation. In that simulation, the US had major losses, no real gains, and they would have lost, had it not been for the head of the military disallowing the side playing "Iraq" to do anything not known beforehand.

Read about it here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0...786992,00.html

I personally think it would be foolish to make any assumptions based on the limited information we have.

Here's the article:

Wake-up call

If the US and Iraq do go to war, there can only be one winner, can't there? Maybe not. This summer, in a huge rehearsal of just such a conflict - and with retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper playing Saddam - the US lost. Julian Borger asks the former marine how he did it

Friday September 6, 2002
The Guardian

At the height of the summer, as talk of invading Iraq built in Washington like a dark, billowing storm, the US armed forces staged a rehearsal using over 13,000 troops, countless computers and $250m. Officially, America won and a rogue state was liberated from an evil dictator.

What really happened is quite another story, one that has set alarm bells ringing throughout America's defence establishment and raised questions over the US military's readiness for an Iraqi invasion. In fact, this war game was won by Saddam Hussein, or at least by the retired marine playing the Iraqi dictator's part, Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper.

In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt.

What happened next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in the playground. Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines making abrasive remarks until the three-week war game - grandiosely entitled Millennium Challenge - staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15, with a US "victory".

If the Pentagon thought it could keep its mishap quiet, it underestimated Van Riper. A classic marine - straight-talking and fearless, with a purple heart from Vietnam to prove it - his retirement means he no longer has to put up with the bureaucratic niceties of the defence department. So he blew the whistle.

His driving concern, he tells the Guardian, is that when the real fighting starts, American troops will be sent into battle with a set of half-baked tactics that have not been put to the test.

"Nothing was learned from this," he says. "A culture not willing to think hard and test itself does not augur well for the future." The exercise, he says, was rigged almost from the outset.

Millennium Challenge was the biggest war game of all time. It had been planned for two years and involved integrated operations by the army, navy, air force and marines. The exercises were part real, with 13,000 troops spread across the United States, supported by actual planes and warships; and part virtual, generated by sophisticated computer models. It was the same technique used in Hollywood blockbusters such as Gladiator. The soldiers in the foreground were real, the legions behind entirely digital.

The game was theoretically set in 2007 and pitted Blue forces (the US) against a country called Red. Red was a militarily powerful Middle Eastern nation on the Persian Gulf that was home to a crazed but cunning megalomaniac (Van Riper). Arguably, when the exercises were first planned back in 2000, Red could have been Iran. But by July this year, when the game kicked off, it is unlikely that anyone involved had any doubts as to which country beginning with "I" Blue was up against.

"The game was described as free play. In other words, there were two sides trying to win," Van Riper says.

Even when playing an evil dictator, the marine veteran clearly takes winning very seriously. He reckoned Blue would try to launch a surprise strike, in line with the administration's new pre-emptive doctrine, "so I decided I would attack first."

Van Riper had at his disposal a computer-generated flotilla of small boats and planes, many of them civilian, which he kept buzzing around the virtual Persian Gulf in circles as the game was about to get under way. As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal - not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks. Meanwhile, Chinese Silkworm-type cruise missiles fired from some of the small boats sank the US fleet's only aircraft carrier and two marine helicopter carriers. The tactics were reminiscent of the al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole in Yemen two years ago, but the Blue fleet did not seem prepared. Sixteen ships were sunk altogether, along with thousands of marines. If it had really happened, it would have been the worst naval disaster since Pearl Harbor.

It was at this point that the generals and admirals monitoring the war game called time out.

"A phrase I heard over and over was: 'That would never have happened,'" Van Riper recalls. "And I said: nobody would have thought that anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Centre... but nobody seemed interested."

In the end, it was ruled that the Blue forces had had the $250m equivalent of their fingers crossed and were not really dead, while the ships were similarly raised from watery graves.

Van Riper was pretty fed up by this point, but things were about to get worse. The "control group", the officers refereeing the exercise, informed him that US electronic warfare planes had zapped his expensive microwave communications systems.

"You're going to have to use cellphones and satellite phones now, they told me. I said no, no, no - we're going to use motorcycle messengers and make announcements from the mosques," he says. "But they refused to accept that we'd do anything they wouldn't do in the west."

Then Van Riper was told to turn his air defences off at certain times and places where Blue forces were about to stage an attack, and to move his forces away from beaches where the marines were scheduled to land. "The whole thing was being scripted," he says.

Within his ever narrowing constraints, Van Riper continued to make a nuisance of himself, harrying Blue forces with an arsenal of unorthodox tactics, until one day, on July 29, he thinks, he found his orders to his subordinate officers were not being listened to any more. They were being countermanded by the control group. So Van Riper quit. "I stayed on to give advice, but I stopped giving orders. There was no real point any more," he says.

Van Riper's account of Millennium Challenge is not disputed by the Pentagon. It does not deny "refloating" the Blue navy, for example. But that, it argues, is the whole point of a war game.

Vice-Admiral Cutler Dawson, the commander of the ill-fated fleet, and commander, in real life, of the US 2nd Fleet, says: "When you push the envelope, some things work, some things don't. That's how you learn from the experiment."

The whole issue rapidly became a cause celebre at the Pentagon press briefing, where the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, got the vice-chairman of the joint chiefs-of-staff, General Peter Pace, to explain why the mighty US forces had needed two lives in order to win.

"You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?" General Pace asked.

Van Riper agrees with Pace in principle, but says the argument is beside the point.

"Scripting is not a problem because you're trying to learn something," he says. "The difference with this one was that it was advertised up front as free play in order to validate the concepts they were trying to test, to see if they were robust enough to put into doctrine."

It is these "concepts" that are at the core of a serious debate that underlies what would otherwise be a silly row about who was playing fair and who wasn't. The US armed forces are in the throes of what used to be called a "Revolution in Military Affairs", and is now usually referred to simply as "transformation". The general idea is to make the US military more flexible, more mobile and more imaginative. It was this transformation that Rumsfeld was obsessed with during his first nine months in office, until September 11 created other priorities.

The advocates of transformation argue that it requires a whole new mindset, from the generals down to the ordinary infantryman. So military planners, instead of drawing up new tactics, formulate more amorphous "concepts" intended to change fundamentally the American soldier's view of the battlefield.

The principal concept on trial in Millennium Challenge was called "rapid, decisive operation" (RDO), and as far as Van Riper and many veteran officers are concerned, it is gobbledegook. "As if anyone would want slow, indecisive operations! These are just slogans," he snorts.

The question of transformation and the usefulness of concepts such as RDO are the subject of an intense battle within the Pentagon, in which the uniformed old guard are frequently at odds with radical civilian strategists of the kind Rumsfeld brought into the Pentagon.

John Pike, the head of GlobalSecurity.org, a military thinktank in Washington, believes the splits over transformation and the whole Van Riper affair reflect fundamental differences of opinion on how to pursue the war on Iraq.

"One way is to march straight to Baghdad, blowing up everything in your way and then by shock and awe you cause the regime to collapse," Pike says. "That is what Rumsfeld is complaining about when he talks about unimaginative plodding. The alternative is to bypass the Iraqi forces and deliver a decisive blow."

Van Riper denies being opposed to new military thinking. He just thinks it should be written in plain English and put to the test. "My main concern was that we'd see future forces trying to use these things when they've never been properly grounded in an experiment," he says.

The name Van Riper draws either scowls or rolling eyes at the Pentagon these days, but there are anecdotal signs that he has the quiet support of the uniformed military, who, after all, will be the first to discover whether the Iraq invasion plans work in real life.

"He can be a real pain in the ass, but that's good," a fellow retired officer told the Army Times. "He's a great guy, and he's a great patriot, and he's doing all those things for the right reasons."

Anybody see that movie "3 Kings".

*Chris Farley Voice*

Hehe yeah that was cool! And ummmm the part where all the iraqi soldiers were worried that sadam was going to kill them all. Hehe yeah that was awesome!

:winkwink:

DH

If this was is gonna be a swift one or not is anyones guess.

But who believes that killing alot or Iraqis will reduce terrorism againt the US?
It will come back and bite you/us in the ass.

Saddam was supported in the war against Iran by most of the Western world. Noone wanted/wants religious maniacs in control of significant Arab countries.

Just imagine the future outlook if muslim fanatics take control, or split the country of Iraq after Saddam is removed/killed?
Actually I'd rather have an Iraq with Saddam in charge, than what I'm seeing in Iran today - those guys are nuts, and probably more involved in terrorism than Saddam is.

Somehow I can't see democracy flying in Iraq. All of the powers that be who surround Iraq are probably scared to death of democracy. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are both kingdoms and kings are notorious for wanting to stay in power. What would happen if all of the middle East suddenly wanted to elect their own leaders? I think we're more likely to see a leader installed that is acceptable to Iraq's neighbors and no elections. Please note that all of the above is my own personal opinion and I have no facts to back this up. ( I just hate it when people post their opinions as facts )

You do realize that last time, Saddam's forces were attacked while they were on unknown ground and on the retreat, right? You also realize his elite forces weren't present, right? And you realize that they're gonna be hiding in the cities, which can't just be nuked unless the US wants a real big fucking problem, right?

because clinton didn't push hard enough