Simple rebuttal to the claim "Everyone thought Sadaam had WMD's"

[Armstead]

Sure, a lot of people thought that. But most of the world did not believe that justified a pre-emptive invasion with no concrete evidence.

The suspicions were not the problem. How the US administration chose to handle those suspicions is the issue.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Agreed

No one uses that meme with me, though, because I was one of the millions who was out protesting before the war. I knew there weren't any WMDs there then, and I made sure everyone around me knew it.

[Armstead]

6. It's true that not everyone believed it

But that's the "meme" they are using to downplay the cooked hype that was fed to us.

The real point is that even among those nations that may have believed it, most of the world did not support going to war on that basis.

[cantstandbush]

34. I was going to post this point myself. Thanks. That's what our answer

to the Bushcos has to be.

[goju]

2. Yep

We have to stop repeating that we went to war for lies. It opens the door to that argument. We need to just simply say, we shouldnt have gone to war, period!

[JDPriestly]

16. The lie was that Iraq's WMDs posed an imminent threat.

They didn't, as the Downing Street Memos make clear. Bush and his administration including Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney and their staffs lied about the extent to which Hussein's supposed WMDs posed an imminent threat to us and to his neighbors. In addition, they lied about specific weapons systems and facilities they claimed Saddam had. He didn't have them, and if they didn't "know" it, it is only because they chose to ignore evidence that would have placed their "belief" in doubt. By ignoring that evidence in making representations about the weapons to the American people and Congress, they committed fraud -- they lied.

The Bush administration "believed" in the sense that they had faith in the idea that Hussein had specific WMDs that he did not have. They held this belief only because they refused to consider facts or opinions that were contrary to it. Had they kept their "belief" or faith to themselves, there would be no problem. But, they represented that "belief" or "faith" which was based on ignoring evidence to the contrary, to Congress, the press and the American people as constituting the truth. That is a form of fraud. WHEN YOU ARE IN A POSITION OF TRUST AS WERE THEY, you have an obligation to tell the whole truth and to check the facts before you make a representation that something is true if you know that the person to whom you make the representation will rely on your statement and act to their detriment in reliance on it. If you don't tell the whole truth and if you don't make a reasonable effort to check the facts, you have committed fraud -- lied.

Here is an illustration: You hire a real estate agent to find a house for you. The agent IS IN A POSITION OF TRUST WITH REGARD TO YOU and has a legal duty to tell you the truth and to act faithfully on your behalf. The agent finds a house. You ask the agent to make sure the house is on solid ground, not prone to mudslides. The agent investigates and finds two engineering reports, one stating that the ground is solid, the other stating it is not. If the agent tells you that the ground is solid and does not tell you about the report to the contrary, the agent has misrepresented the truth about the reports and the ground. If the house is damaged due to the problems with the ground, the agent will be found to have lied and may may have to pay you for your damages.

NOTE THAT THE KEY IS THAT A SPECIAL DUTY ARISES WHEN SOMEONE ACCEPTS A POSITION OF TRUST IN RELATION TO ANOTHER PERSON. Many relationships do not involve such trust. You don't have an obligation to tell your a perfect stranger or even your neighbor the whole truth about where you were Saturday night. But, Bush, as President, is in a position of trust with the American people. He is supposed to tell us the truth and the whole truth. Bush told us the ground was solid for going to war. He did not tell us about the negative reports. In so doing, he committed fraud. That is one of several forms of fraud -- or in ordinary language, lying.

Here, Bush disregarded negative reports when reporting on the state of the WMDs to the nation. He had a duty to tell us the truth. He violated that duty. That was fraud. In the law, it equals a lie.

[seabeyond]

3. did not believe that justified a pre-emptive invasion

perfect. you are right. lets remember, if nothing else we figured he still had some of that old stuff. and bushco knew americans wouldnt go for that. was broadcasted. wasnt a secret. they new they had to bring it to mushroom cloud and the possibility it could reach the american people. hence the forged documents and the drone arguement so it would reach the american shores.

even if they found wmd's that would not make invasion ok.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. Seems that I remember about 20 million people protesting the

invasion, world-wide, prior to it happening. So guess, 'everyone' didn't buy into that bull.

[Armstead]

8. To repeat what I wrote above...

You are right. A lot of people didn;t believe it.

But I am focused on the claim that because everyone was wrong, the administration was merely acting on the same basis.

What's important is not the suspicions or even the knowledge. It's HOW IT WAS USED to justify war.

[Deep13]

5. "The inspectors didn't."

Anyway, when war is the issue, it is not enough to be reasonable, one has to be right.

[wookie294]

7. Not everyone thought Saddam had nukes

The nuclear weapon lie was the biggest reason Americans supported the invasion.

On 7 March 2003, Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told the Security Council that the IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull461/article21.pdf

[Lexingtonian]

9. the lumping term 'WMDs" contains the lie they rely on

That Hussein might still have few degraded nerve gas-containing shells in some depot somewhere, that was a relatively fair assumption that a lot of people accepted.

That there was an in any way functional nuclear weapons program- the evidence there was for it was crap from the start. If there was such a program running or hiding, the priority given to finding evidence for it during 2002 would have found better stuff than the bullshit that was being sold from the start.

"It's good for the rulers that most men don't think." -Adolf Hitler

[Name removed]

20. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ScreamingMeemie]

27. Serious question...Were you proud of your president when he made

a joke of being wrong about finding WMD's by showing slides of himself looking for them all over the oval office? Were you proud that he was belittling the deaths of hundreds ( at that time) of soldiers? Funny how you talk out of both sides of your mouth.


And,for what it is worth, many of us had many a problem with Kerry, but at least he had the best interests of the country (instead of the financial interests of his dad and friends) at forefront. Politics is politics, and your boy fails miserably as the polls are suggesting. Mature enough for you? :think:

[Lexingtonian]

29. I'm not sure you're talking to/at me

but from having lived around these things all my life, first of all building nuclear weapons is an industrial project. It requires at a minimum hundreds of people to be working with the material, dozens to do the mathematics and experimentation, and several dozen to make all the decisions, logistical arrangements, etc. Your minimal basic price tag is about 10,000 man-years even if you know all the science and most of the engineering and have all the materials and trained people. Your absolutely minimal price tag is $1 billion. There is no way of hiding an effort involving that kind of scale and money in the Middle East.

Secondly, this is the Middle East. Social life is clan based and highly tribal. Gossip and rumor is an essential feature in highly oral cultures of the kind. In a sense there are no secrets, you merely have to know who to ask and money greatly increases the speed at which things get told. If you know what you're doing.

Having no shortage of people I know in 'the military' and a friend of my dad's having been CIA director, I think I'm fairly aware of the scope of what gets done. It's people like you who are impressed by it, who look at it from the bottom up and presume it has magical powers rather than being largely the dreary shit it is and pretty obvious when seen from the top down and with some good idea of what was technically possible. Your life is apparently invested in it all being a noble cause- whereas for you employers it was simply about preventing the worst.

If you actually read the evidence that is out there, Bush pretended there were several different pieces of independent evidence that Hussein had tried to obtain uranium for weapons. The facts are that the Italians in various ways disseminated that one forged document's claims- as the document itself, as 'transcript' from the text of it, as claims of the anonymous Nigerien employee to vouch for for it- which all, now that they've been fully backtracked, lead back to the one, forged, piece of "evidence". There is other stuff- the "aluminum tubes" that were supposedly to be used for uranium enrichment turn out to have been artillery rocket sheathings that the Italian manufacturer got smuggled into Iraq; Berlusconi's government identified them, apparently, for what they were but was embarrassed by it and let Rice and Powell exaggerate and vehemently assert these to be proof of uranium enrichment.

As for your bullshit about Kerry, you misquote him and seem to be as naive and magical-thinking about small d democratic politics as you are about intelligence and other big picture stuff.

And just where is your anger at Dick Cheney and the other liars? Where is your integrity that this war was largely about large masses of stupid Americans who felt their vanity violated, who found in militant and badly behaving Arabs the scapegoat for their fear and loathing of Modernity? Most people who were fervent about this war did not actually care about the facts as long as they could be concocted to fit a suspicion. The need wasn't for a reason, it was for an excuse to go out and behave Important and strike back against a world that was and is undermining their selfrighteous idea of being a Messianic people, of being the First among (not so) Equals.

As for Al Qaeda, it came into Iraq as soon as Americans collapsed Hussein's control of his borders. Only in the past year has the American occupation force tried to get control of the Iraqi borders.

It's not easy to run a discussion when one side has no grip of the facts and works by correlation rather than causation.

[dennis4868]

10. No one thought Saddam had.....

nuclear weapons, the most serious kind of WMD (except for the USA of course).

No one thought Saddam had UAV (except for the USA of course).

I could go on and on with the bullshit that was coming out of our government in the run up to the war!

[liberal N proud]

11. Mute point: Even if Saddam had WMD's - the bu$h regime did not

exhaust every diplomatic means before attacking.
In fact they did the opposite, they cooked the figures to expedite the process before diplomacy was finished.

[Armstead]

30. That IS my point

I don't agree with the meme that "Everybody believed it" but I am addressing the half truth involved. The half truth is that a lot of people did believe that he might have WMD's -- but they did not advocate going to war over it. They advbocated inspections and otehr methods.

The point is -- regardless of what anyone thought, the fact that the Bush administration chose war as the only recourse undermines the claims that they were justified and going along with the majority opinion.

[Walt Starr]

12. My response:

"so I guess I'm not part of 'everyone" because I sure as hell didn't think Saddam had WMDs!"

[JDPriestly]

19. Colin Powell represented to the United Nations that he did.

And Powell pretended to back up his statements with evidence. The evidence was bogus. If you watch how the troops proceeded ss they entered Iraq, you will realize that the Bush administration knew the Powell statements were false. There was no rush to suspected WMD sites. The rush was to the oil ministry and the leaders' palaces. In fact, our troops were not ordered to safeguard the weapons stores that we knew Saddam had. The weapons storage areas were left unattended and military material disappeared from them because they were not adequately guarded. Had Bush thought that Hussein had WMDs, his priority would have been to take the locations where the WMDs were stored. That was not his priority. The oil industry was the focus. Bush sent in teams to look for WMDs, but the teams were not center stage and did not get the huge amount of support they would have had if Bush had really been concerned about destroying large caches of WMDS. The troops went straight for Baghdad, not for the weapons storage areas. Very few troops were sent to hold the weapons storage areas. Many were sent to Baghdad. I'm inclined to believe that Bush would have sent a lot more troops in -- to replace troops killed by WMDs -- if he had really believed that Hussein had WMDs.

[J_T]

13. Here's what I say when people use that...

Not everyone believed it. Those of us who were skeptical from the start have been proven right.

We were right. You were wrong.

[newyawker99]

36. Hi J_T!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[rock]

14. If so many people believed it

Who lied to them?

[stopbush]

15. Not. I will not cede any ground on that issue. No way everybody

thought he had them. I certainly didn't. I went through some very animated arguments with my RW yuppie neighbors over that while it was happening. I was right, they were wrong! No way I cede that point - ever!

[Armstead]

31. Again, I am refering to the talking point, not the truth

There is justification to say that a lot of people believed it.

But regardless of that, the lie that Bush shared ther general opoinion of the world was a falsehood, because even those who believed it did not support going to war over it.

Put anotehr way, it was only a minority who both believed it AND believed it justified an invasion.

[WilliamPitt]

17. Simpler rebuttal

August of 2002.

[wiggs]

18. WHEN?

It IS accurate to say that everybody knows Saddam had WMD....in 1990. That's why you hear pundits and GOPr's make the claim you post. It is technically true, but slimey.

It is categorically UNTRUE to say that everybody thought he had them in 2003 and one could do the research to document it. In 2003, lots of countries thought he MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT have them....there was uncertainty. It should be obvious that the evidence Powell presented in his UN speech was embarrassingly thin...cartoons of mobile labs, grainy photos of construction sites, and of course the phoney Niger reference. This "thinness" is echoed in DSM.

No...the US stood alone in insisting he had WMD...the coaltion countries joined in the refrain only because they were bribed and arm-twisted.

Makes me angry when this claim is made in MSM without challenge.

[ContraBass Black]

21. I didn't.

[FreedomAngel82]

22. I can't remember who it was who said this

but I think it was Jon Stewart who said Germany didn't want to go to war and they didn't think he had anything. And if he did more people wouldn't have left the country and pulled out such as Germany.

[MadHound]

23. If "Everyone thought Sadaam had WMD's", then explain why

There were millions of people, both here and abroad who were out in the streets and saying differently. And millions of people who were calling to the Hill and saying differently. And every single major poll was showing that the American public overwhelmingly wanted the US to let the inspectors finish their job before doing anything.

This is just another fucking RW meme that is trying to shift the blame off of Bushco and onto the rest of us. Bullshit, all bullshit.

[Beaverhausen]

24. If they really thought he did, would they send US soldiers right into them

Seriously- can you imagine what would have happened if chemical and/or biological weapons were used on our soldiers?

There is no way the administration really believed their WMD lies.

[mondo joe]

25. Or "That's what the inspecttions are for - to see if suspicions hold up."

[wookie294]

26. And inspections were going very well

In March 2003 the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said "at this juncture we are able to perform professional no-notice inspections all over Iraq and to increase aerial surveillance."

http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/SC7asdelivered.htm

[donkeyotay]

28. Not everyone. Mostly the people who watch FOX , listen to Rush or

run the White House.

Here's a great and timely quote from Sen. Roberts, yes the man investigating the bogus intell, the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on What Passes for Intelligence:

"Why on earth didn't (Saddam) let the inspectors in and avoid the war?" quoted by Paul Krugman, NYTs, Feb. 6, 2004.

And W. Patrick Lang's response to this question:

"The answer to his question is simple: Saddam did let the inspectors in... the question that Senator Roberts should really be asking is, why didn't it matter?"

from "Drinking the Kool-aid" 2004.

The inspections were working. Bush drummed up a half-baked case to end them. Bush drummed up a better case to push the country to war (mushroom clouds) because HE WASN'T MAKING HIS CASE. You remember "the case for war?" His case sucked. (Saddam was a bad man.) He had to reach for something better.

[understandinglife]

32. My answer to that statement: "Not true" and then I give them a copy ...

... of my pamphlet and in a few short pages they have all the documentation required to know it was all lies -- publicly documented lies before March 19, 2003.


Peace.

[Armstead]

33. FOLKS, I DIDN;T BELIEVE IT EITHER -- BUT THAT IS THE LINE

My originsal point was very simple.

They are trotting out the line about most nations and American politicians believing Sadaam had WMD.

They are going to trot it out more, if there ever is a real investigation of what happened.

Regardless of the exact ratio of those who believed it or didn't believe it, there is one crystal clear fact. EVEN AMONG THOSE LEADERS WHO BELIEVED IT MIGHT BE TRUE, MOST DID NOT AGREE WITH BUSH THAT WAR WAS THE LOGICAL NEXT STEP.

The reason this is important is that the core of this is how they chose to deal with that belief. And the administration was against the majority of world opinion -- even among those who shared their suspicions.

[Yoda Yada]

35. Coalition of the UNwilling....

No, "everyone" did not think Sadaam had WMD. That is why the Coalition of the UNWILLING was LARGER than Bush's Coalition of the Willing.

[newyawker99]

37. Hi Yoda Yada!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast: