That's right. And the UN let him get away with it. Starting in late 2002, the UN stopped letting him get away with it and his house of cards started to fall. Just as Saddam was about to be exposed as a toothless blowhard, W invaded.

If W's goal had been to disarm Saddam, he would have insisted that the inspections be backed up by military force. If Saddam prevented unfettered inspection of a facility, the inspectors would warn the occupants of that facility to withdraw to a safe distance and then our planes would vaporize the facility. The inspectors would then repeat the process at the next facility. That's what should have happened from the beginning.

Maybe he got tired of the cat and mouse games.

Do you think the UN would have gone along with that plan. I could see that as a good plan and like you said, it should have been done from the beginning but that was under another administration.

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Now, there's a great reason to start a war.Since when did you (or W) care about that?So?

Okay, so in order to check antibiotics you need to have the capacity to raise agricultural pathogens. Can you name any important agricultural pathogens? Where do you think one buys agricultural (or human) pathogens for those tests? Also, one must be able to properly raise the pathogens for periodic testing so one needs to have some level of production capacity for these pathogens.

As you can see, the same technology that can be used to produce & test antibiotics could, under the maligned direction of ruthless people, be designed to produce pathogens in quantities to be used as weapon.

Also, the organophosphate chemical family that contains very effective insecticides also contains organophosphates that are particularly poisonous to vertebrates. So under the maligned direction of ruthless people, organophosphate chemicals could be manufactured by using much the same process designed to produce agricultural chemicals in quantities to be used as weapons.

We have given these types of technologies to many countries over the past few decades. To my knowledge only one country has attempted to weaponize these technologies.

.

Well I have not been suspended yet, so I guess I can continue with
this thread.

Yes bot,

I think I understand what you are saying.
Basically, good things can be used for bad.
And the other way around.

Does this have something to do with Ronnie giving Saddam weapons?
Or Saddam having WMDs that we never found?

And if you would bring it back down to earth, you don't have to talk
like the dean of the chemistry/biology department to me.

I already get that you are saying that you are so much smarter than I
am, and you have to talk down to me.

I am really really really tired of the insults from everyone.
Especially now that I cannot fart on this forum without getting an infraction.
While everyone else can give me all the grief they want.

You be nice to me, and I will be nice to you, OK.

.

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When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Jimi Hendrix

Well, bye, bye RichC.
You are the guy who called everyone who disagreed with, and I quote, "right wing nut cases".
So, being called "obtuse" is name-calling.

Unless you were thinking " obeese" and meant it as a gag.
I don't get it.

But since you are through with this argument, you will not read this.

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1982 300SD " Wotan" ..On the road as of Jan 8, 2007 with Historic Tags

Well, if you are going to keep playing cat and mouse, don't you think that at some point, we need to pull the plug and get serious or do you think we should have kept on with the cat and mouse and after 20 years, still be where we are? At some point, we needed to say "enough is enough". Every time we have gotten tough, we got somewhere. However, with that step forward, he takes a step or two back in a while.

Well, if the inspections were done with UN inspectors under the UN banner, I doubt you can pull it off. If it were US inspectors, probably.

That plan you speak of should have been done then. Obviously it is too late in 2003. But at the time, nobody knew that it already has been moved. We were hoping to intercept it before then but we were too late.

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Since we were able to invade the country, something tells me we could have done the inspections. If for some reason the UN or others prevented the orderly completion of the inspections, backed up by immediate military force, then Bush would have gone ahead with the invasion secure in the knowledge that he tried every alternative. Why is that obvious? In fact, it is now obvious that an aggressive inspection program would have eliminated the need for this war.

I suppose if your intention is to make a show of it, that might be fine. I suppose your way would have just crossed all the "t"s and dotted all the "i"s. Not that, I doubt for one moment, it would still lead us back to where we are now.

Obvious because aggressive inspection programs are too late. It has bought him the time to move it to locations unknown. IOW, at 2003, the horses have long gone and even if you did it then, all you would be doing is closing the barn door AFTER the horses have escaped.

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That's not "all [we] would be doing". We would also have avoided a war that, so far, has: (a) killed almost 4,000 of our military people and untold thousands of Iraqis; (b) squandered our credibility (remember Colin Powell at the UN?); (c) alienated many who would be our allies; (d) destroyed massive amounts of public and private property in Iraq; (e) strengthened Iran; and (f) cost us billions of dollars, probably climbing past a trillion before we are done.

To each his own, but I tend to think that it would have been nice to avoid those things.

As I have said before, the cost of this war is prohibitive and I would have been against it if we knew then what we know now. Being that we don't have some sort of way to know for sure that Saddam had moved all the materials to who knows where, it was a chance. It could have worked out either way. I don't think I give a rip about c and d seeing as how they will be back once they need something that we can provide. e, I'm not so sure. Depends on how things play out in the end. As to f, it depends. Again, in today's light, it would have been pointless. Back then, not knowing that the WMD was already gone, it would have been a gamble.

Yes it would have been nice to avoid the war. Saddam wasn't cooperating and that was the problem. If he had cooperated, things would have been simpler.

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That's the truth. One of the most surprising things about this whole affair is that Saddam comes off looking like a bizarre, evil buffoon.

There's not a shred of evidence that Saddam moved anything out of the country. Do you really think that would have been possible, with all the inspectors on the ground, US aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones, and our satellites keeping a close eye? Let's also not forget that the inspectors were forced out of the country to make way for our invasion. The inspectors made it clear that their work was not done yet and there was no reason to invade at the time. W couldn't care less about any inspections. He's wanted regime change since before he even came to office. 9/11 provided the right opportunity.

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OK. So material went in and disappeared and was not accounted for. Do you believe that is more possible than it being moved out of country?

The last time, yes. Before that, it was Saddam that did it.

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I think what's more possible is that either the accounting wasn't accurate or Saddam destroyed some weapons secretly so as not to be caught having anything illegal and giving the US a real reason to invade while at the same time keeping Iran and others deterred from invading. This isn't just my speculation. This is coming from one of his defectors (I saw the interview on TV).

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