Our World-Historical Gamble.

[Axis Kast]

Because it won't work, dumb-ass. Saddam cannot be reliably controlled.

Yet you've no doubt an inspection régime would have led to full disarmament and eliminated the threat of exchanges between Baghdad and third parties in technology, resources, training, or information?

[Edi]

You have an amazing ability to take things out of context, Axis of Evil Cast-iron Skulls.


http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame63.html


http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame78.html

Do you happen to recognize these guys?
They are the very picture of you.

What DW is saying is that Saddam could not be reliably controlled by the US if it supported him. That is an entirely different thing from having him surrounded by massive military force that outguns him by orders of magnitude and simultaneously strangling his economy and forcibly inspecting his country for the presence of WMD.

You have your head so far up your ass you must be looking out of your mouth to see where you're going, too bad the view is just more of your anal tract.

Edi[/img]

[Axis Kast]

If Hussein cannot be reliably controlled in America's pocket - with all the lovely benefits of an alliance with Washington might bring -, what makes you or Wong so certain that he can be curbed by weapons inspectors?

[Patrick Degan]

It is, in my opinion, quite likely that the Iraqis are secretly mining uranium or hoarding the tools necessary for reimplimentation of a nuclear program. Do they have a functional reactor or more than makeshift testing facilities however? Probably not. I’d say that a dirty bomb is still five years away at the earliest – assuming we’ve missed something large and Iraq is the benefactor of outside assistance.

Proof, please. Evidence, please. Or are you simply going to keep pulling these guesses out of your ass?

Hussein regularly kills his own people. According to your evidence, it is quite similar. President Bush has outlined Iraq as posing a clear threat to the United States. I agree.

Unless you can point to actual American civilians within Iraq under threat by the regime, the situations are not similar at all. Mindlessly parroting whatever Bush says does not alter this.

the 241 U.S. Marines who were killed in the Beruit bunker bombing carried out by Hezbollah were deliberately put in harm's way and furthermore had not been issued ammunition for their weapons. In short, we ourselves bunched our people together as perfect targets in a known hazard zone.

They constitute a sort of icing on the cake of disarmament and basic régime-change.

Then why wasn't it a good enough reason twenty years ago?

At current the United Nations is buying to the ridiculous notion of “collective pascifism.” It doesn’t matter that they can act – but that they don’t.

Arguments deriving from AM radio propaganda have no validity.

Please. Nobody ever even considered “serious consequences” other than the U.S. and its allies. And resolutions 678 and 687 both suggested – according to Bush last night – that forced disarmament was legal.

The actual texts of resolutions 678 and 687 say nothing about war being the immediate consequence of Iraqi failure to comply.

Saddam Hussein thought the same thing going into Kuwait in 1990.

Who’s going to stop us? Concrete examples.

That is not the question in this instance. Please stop being so simple-minded.

I explain away nothing. An appeal to emotion does not a justification for preemptive war make, no matter how much you wish it did.

A threat to American citizens.

A threat you have failed to define in any way, shape, or form other than using the simplistic Saddam/9-11 equation. Iraq does not have the military capability to threaten the United States, nor has it been complicit in any terrorist actions committed within the U.S. itself.

The evidence uncovered by UNMOVIC says otherwise, and Iraq's production of Al-Samouds has been anemic at best. Iraq still has only half the war machine it possessed in the 1991 war, no matter how much you wish to deny this central fact.

But we’re not talking about a conventional war machine. We’re talking about proliferation of WMD.

The results of UNMOVIC inspections to date do not support your case.

He has not deployed them in twelve years. What part of this is so difficult to comprehend, exactly?

What makes you so sure he’ll continue that trend? The stakes are rising. He’s becoming convinced that his régime will soon go the way of the Dodo whether or not the U.S. invades.

Do you even have any fucking clue what "burden of proof" is? WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING PROOF FOR ALL THESE SURMISES OF YOURS?! Not "guess", not "belief", —hard evidence.

International law is majority opinion. We have seen material fact in the newly-discovered weapons systems.

International law is far more than majority opinion, whether you wish to recognise this or not. And the new weapons systems you keep harping on are of anemic capability at best, indeterminate at worst, and were in the process of being destroyed.

Nevermind that regime-change did not become an official goal of Washington until just a scant three weeks ago.

I disagree. It was unstated policy all along.

It was the desire of the Bush inner circle, but it became policy only three weeks ago and only after the administration found itself frustrated in the search for a definable basis for war justifications.

The al-Samouds are being destroyed because they were found. And stop talking about the conventional threat posed by Hussein. It’s off-topic.

Because you say so? Sorry, it doesn't work that way. The question is whether Iraq poses an immediate military threat to either the United States or any of the border states in the region, justifying war in accordance to the terms of the Nuremburg Charter and the UN articles. Clearly it does not.

Total disarmament and containment is impossibler without régime-change.

And once again —Iraq has conducted how many invasions since 1991? Zero? Thought so. And disarmament was proceeding, as both Messrs. Blix and ElBaradai have testified to in their reports.

Despite the moves for peace worldwide, most governments are selfishly interested in preventing an invasion.

What a surprise that governments act in accordance to their interests! Which would also include not destabilising the Middle East, not disrupting the global economy, not providing a spark for increased terrorism, and maintaining a framework for negotiated settlement of crises which defuses the resort to war.

At best it (Grenada) was about quelling revolution and the airstrip. Saddam’s situation is little different. We’re putting down a dictator who threatens us.

No, Grenada was about protecting American citizens who were under actual threat from revolutionary chaos and violence. Saddam Hussein is a pissant little thug who never had the capability to threaten the United States even at his height and certainly does not possess that ability today. Or are you going to argue that he could possibly stop us from overrunning his nation?

Israel has not been at "severe risk" from this man for twelve years, and certainly has more than enough military force of its own to deal with Iraq if it ever became such a threat. Or are you seriously proposing that Iraq constitutes a mortal threat to a country with 200 atomic bombs?

You want Israel to have to use one of those bombs? We’ll have to go in anyway if Israel is hit. On Saddam’s time.

If Israel had perceived a threat of any type to its survival from Saddam Hussein in the last twelve years, they'd have hit them on their own long before this point. And Israel has more than just its stockpile of atomic bombs to protect itself with. They certainly didn't need any of the things when they hit the Tammuz nuclear facility back in 1983. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein is not going to undertake any action which will swing world sympathies solidly against him in the present war. A strike against Israel would achieve this and therefore would be suicidal —beyond the fact of the sort of retaliation which would come their way from the Sharon government. Despite whatever you belive, Hussein is not Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

And your proof for this surmise is...?

The patterns of his proliferation.

His "proliferation" has been a joke at best, and no worse than the known proliferations of chemical and/or biological weapons from far greater threats upon the international stage such as North Korea. His nuclear capabilities are nonexistent and there is considerable question as to how much useable chemical and biological weapons he actually has in his grasp; due in part to the fact that many of these agents degrade within timeframes of ten years.

No such tests or capabilities have been observed by UNMOVIC inspectors on the ground at the Ababil test facility in Central Iraq. The most advanced that they've gotten is the Al-Samoud 2, which can only exceed the 150km. limit by not carrying a payload, and those are in the process of being destroyed.

According to President Bush, the infrastructure exists.

The UNMOVIC inspectors say otherwise, and Bush's evidence has been laughably thin, to say the least. That is where it hasn't been based upon forged documentation and plagerised college term-papers.

And you simply decided to cherry-pick your way through Blix's testimony to derive the conclusions you wish to entertain. Your original charge was that "he has drones capable of carrying chemical agents"; whereas the Blix report makes no such positive assertion.

It says he can target troops.

It says "might" be able to target troops. Not "can". Blix has made no positive assertion one way or the other, and now will never get the chance to do so.

By means which does not make it worth the effort or the expense, to support a non-existent nuclear development capability. Try chewing your way out of that bear-trap as much as you like and it still comes out the same: the aluminum tubes are not suitable.

It was worth the expense if he meant to hide them all along or couldn’t easily get the real thing. And again, “unsuited to” does not mean that the tubes can’t be machined.

Arguments based upon sheer speculation have no validity. Further, the expense to which I referred was in trying to re-machine the tubes to specifications suitable for uranium centrifuges; for which he does not have the capability in the first place.

Right, it's far better to stop the killing of (maybe) dozens by killing thousands in a war which is likely to spark terrorism instead of suppressing it. Al-Qaeda is already getting a lot of recruitment mileage out of our pending invasion and occupation.

I doubt that al-Qaerda will gian much from this war.

Pictures on live Al-Jazerra TV of hudreds of dead Iraqi civilians will give them plenty of recruiting material. They got a lot of recruiting material simply from our being in Saudi Arabia for ten years.

So are you going to continue to flog the aluminum tubes lie, which has been discredited up, down, and sideways, or shall we move on?

But why are those tubes not yet incorporated into that system?

So, if spare-parts are lying around for a particular system, that constitutes evidence that those parts are intended for some other purpose for which they are not suited? Based on what?

We managed to get Hussein to respect international law when we pushed him out of Kuwait behind the force of UN aanction and backing. And the trick is not playing the game "hard" but "intelligently".

We did it via force.

—after we secured the backing of the UN Security Council and after we secured the full diplomatic and military cooperation of the region's other powers and our allies, and after the case for war had been made successfully to the American people and the Congress. Force without the backing of law is illegitimate and would have resulted in our diplomatic isolation. Bush 41 understood this clearly. You would do well to understand this yourself before spouting nonsense.

[Axis Kast]

Proof, please. Evidence, please. Or are you simply going to keep pulling these guesses out of your ass?

According to TIME Magazine, Iraq’s al-Qaim phosphate plant could potentially house a “uranium extraction facility.” Now I’m not certain whether inspectors visited this particular site or not, but considering that the South Africans hid a pair of atomic boreholes in the Kalahari Desert from detection for a period of over two years, it would not surprise me in the least if Iraq suddenly came to be in possession of several tons of low-grade uranium.

Unless you can point to actual American civilians within Iraq under threat by the regime, the situations are not similar at all. Mindlessly parroting whatever Bush says does not alter this.

Again, see Iraq’s links to Palestinian terrorism and the resulting deaths of American citizens. The last suicide bombing in Haifa led, in fact, to an American casualty.

And Hussein’s ability to threaten Israel and force us to war down the road is sufficient threat against Americans from my point of view.

Then why wasn't it a good enough reason twenty years ago?

The United Nations didn’t want a wider war in Iraq. American officials counseled against it, suggesting that the crisis was over. It seemed as if inspections could guarantee disarmament.

Arguments deriving from AM radio propaganda have no validity.

You deny that the United Nations is practicing collective pacifism?

The actual texts of resolutions 678 and 687 say nothing about war being the immediate consequence of Iraqi failure to comply.

They authorized consequences. So does the cease-fire of 1991, for that matter.

A threat you have failed to define in any way, shape, or form other than using the simplistic Saddam/9-11 equation. Iraq does not have the military capability to threaten the United States, nor has it been complicit in any terrorist actions committed within the U.S. itself.

According to Czech sources, Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. A Spanish judge recently arrested an al-Qaeda operative whom evidence suggests was linked with the Iraqi embassy in Madrid.

Hussein is no conventional threat – but then again, neither was Afghanistan.

The results of UNMOVIC inspections to date do not support your case.

The UNMOVIC inspections have doomed Iraq from a legal point-of-view. Inspectors found evidence of failure to fully disarm. Then the goal-posts were changed and it was insisted that inspectors could somehow root out the complete stockpile of eight and more years and that pulling teeth over a period of months was an acceptable strategy.

Do you even have any fucking clue what "burden of proof" is? WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING PROOF FOR ALL THESE SURMISES OF YOURS?! Not "guess", not "belief", —hard evidence.

You’ve no hard evidence either. You are surmising that he isn’t a threat at all and will not act against us now or in the future. It’s just as much speculation as mine.

International law is far more than majority opinion, whether you wish to recognise this or not. And the new weapons systems you keep harping on are of anemic capability at best, indeterminate at worst, and were in the process of being destroyed.

You mean like those SCUDs the inspectors were supposed to have picked up? UNMOVIC made token finds, but nothing on the road to total disarmament.

International law is the dictation of the armed and active. In general it is the majority. It is always self-serving from the point of view of those practicing the enforcement. Whether or not you hold it in esteem is another question entirely.

It was the desire of the Bush inner circle, but it became policy only three weeks ago and only after the administration found itself frustrated in the search for a definable basis for war justifications.

It became public policy only three weeks ago. They wanted régime-change from the start. You accuse Bush of having been rebuffed legitimately – he made clear arguments, but the rest of the world didn’t want to hear them. Why? Far less a threat from their point-of-view.

Because you say so? Sorry, it doesn't work that way. The question is whether Iraq poses an immediate military threat to either the United States or any of the border states in the region, justifying war in accordance to the terms of the Nuremburg Charter and the UN articles. Clearly it does not.

Opinion. Iraq is a clear threat to Israel. This isn’t a question of his conventional power.

And once again —Iraq has conducted how many invasions since 1991? Zero? Thought so. And disarmament was proceeding, as both Messrs. Blix and ElBaradai have testified to in their reports.

Again, your attempt to bring this into the conventional realm smacks of evasion. Blix and El-Baradei did their job only from the French and German side of the table. Hussein was in direct violation of 1441 all along. It was dragged out from inspections to piddling disarmament by the wrong group of people, most of whom only wanted to find the argument against conflict no matter what.

What a surprise that governments act in accordance to their interests! Which would also include not destabilising the Middle East, not disrupting the global economy, not providing a spark for increased terrorism, and maintaining a framework for negotiated settlement of crises which defuses the resort to war.

Leaving Hussein in power and free to attack others would have caused more damage from our point of view. The spark for increased terrorism? Better that we kick the door in on Hussein. It’s a larger victory than they’ll gain anyway. The “framework for a negotiated settlement” has been ignored, not removed. Don’t be silly. Military preemption of Iraq is an isolated occurance.

No, Grenada was about protecting American citizens who were under actual threat from revolutionary chaos and violence. Saddam Hussein is a pissant little thug who never had the capability to threaten the United States even at his height and certainly does not possess that ability today. Or are you going to argue that he could possibly stop us from overrunning his nation?

The man can aid and abet terrorist activities. He was doing so.

If Israel had perceived a threat of any type to its survival from Saddam Hussein in the last twelve years, they'd have hit them on their own long before this point. And Israel has more than just its stockpile of atomic bombs to protect itself with. They certainly didn't need any of the things when they hit the Tammuz nuclear facility back in 1983. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein is not going to undertake any action which will swing world sympathies solidly against him in the present war. A strike against Israel would achieve this and therefore would be suicidal —beyond the fact of the sort of retaliation which would come their way from the Sharon government. Despite whatever you belive, Hussein is not Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Has it ever occurred to you that Israeli involvement might destabilize the region as much as our own intervention? And the next threat might be more than Israel can conscience responding to conventionally.

His "proliferation" has been a joke at best, and no worse than the known proliferations of chemical and/or biological weapons from far greater threats upon the international stage such as North Korea. His nuclear capabilities are nonexistent and there is considerable question as to how much useable chemical and biological weapons he actually has in his grasp; due in part to the fact that many of these agents degrade within timeframes of ten years.

North Korea is not open to forced régime-change, or haven’t you noticed?

Again, Hussein is a threat no matter how much you wish to downplay his stockpile.

The UNMOVIC inspectors say otherwise, and Bush's evidence has been laughably thin, to say the least. That is where it hasn't been based upon forged documentation and plagerised college term-papers.

UNMOVIC has uncovered clear violations. And aside from your criticism, Bush has the argument right: there can be no meaningful or total disarmament without régime-change.

It says "might" be able to target troops. Not "can". Blix has made no positive assertion one way or the other, and now will never get the chance to do so.

It’s a chance we’re not willing to take.

Arguments based upon sheer speculation have no validity. Further, the expense to which I referred was in trying to re-machine the tubes to specifications suitable for uranium centrifuges; for which he does not have the capability in the first place.

You mean like your argument hat Hussein is no threat?

He has the industrial capability to machine the tubes as far as I’ve heard; it’s just prohibitively expensive and makes little sense compared to what a nation with no bans or impositions might have done.

Pictures on live Al-Jazerra TV of hudreds of dead Iraqi civilians will give them plenty of recruiting material. They got a lot of recruiting material simply from our being in Saudi Arabia for ten years.

Again, kicking in the door on Iraq outweighs the new terrorist threat.

Did you ever stop to think that many of the Iraqis will thank us and thus provide some good PR?

Why are we in Saudi Arabia in the first place? There would be far fewer troops without Hussein.

So, if spare-parts are lying around for a particular system, that constitutes evidence that those parts are intended for some other purpose for which they are not suited? Based on what?

With Hussein? It’s an assumption we can’t afford not to make. Especially because, again, he has no prototypes or test-beds. Why are these tubes just “lying around?”

—after we secured the backing of the UN Security Council and after we secured the full diplomatic and military cooperation of the region's other powers and our allies, and after the case for war had been made successfully to the American people and the Congress. Force without the backing of law is illegitimate and would have resulted in our diplomatic isolation. Bush 41 understood this clearly. You would do well to understand this yourself before spouting nonsense.

We are hardly isolated diplomatically. “Illegitimate” from who’s point-of-view? The dissenters? And we can do this alone with our Coalition allies. We’ve got more than we did in 1991 – they’re just not as high-profile.

[Patrick Degan]

Proof, please. Evidence, please. Or are you simply going to keep pulling these guesses out of your ass?

According to TIME Magazine, Iraq’s al-Qaim phosphate plant could potentially house a “uranium extraction facility.” Now I’m not certain whether inspectors visited this particular site or not, but considering that the South Africans hid a pair of atomic boreholes in the Kalahari Desert from detection for a period of over two years, it would not surprise me in the least if Iraq suddenly came to be in possession of several tons of low-grade uranium.

"Could potentially house", eh? "If", "possibly", "maybe", "suppose", "guess" —every time you are asked to provide bona-fides of your arguments, it's always down to sheer speculation instead of actual hard evidence. Your standards of proof are even more laughable than Colin Powell's.

Unless you can point to actual American civilians within Iraq under threat by the regime, the situations are not similar at all. Mindlessly parroting whatever Bush says does not alter this.

Again, see Iraq’s links to Palestinian terrorism and the resulting deaths of American citizens. The last suicide bombing in Haifa led, in fact, to an American casualty.

You are simply ridiculous. We didn't go to war against Germany in 1915 over 115 deaths on the Lusitania. It's understood that Americans travelling in hazardous region are doing so at their own risk. That's why they issue the travel warnings in the first place. Again, you duck the question of the actual military threat Iraq poses to the United States —which is zero (a fact which is being made patently obvious even as we speak).

And Hussein’s ability to threaten Israel and force us to war down the road is sufficient threat against Americans from my point of view.

Also laughable. Israel can erase Iraq from the map, and Hussein knows this perfectly well. You've been listening to too much of that "mad dictator" crap on TV. Saddam Hussein may be many things, but mad is not among them.

Then why wasn't it a good enough reason twenty years ago?

The United Nations didn’t want a wider war in Iraq. American officials counseled against it, suggesting that the crisis was over. It seemed as if inspections could guarantee disarmament.

Excuse, excuse, excuse. Your entire argument is predicated upon the menace of Saddam Hussein and his WMDs, yet twenty years ago his use of said WMDs against Iran wasn't considered sufficent reason to launch a general war. He wasn't considered a menace when he had larger stockpiles of chemicals at his disposal than today when Iraq's been reduced to a fifth-rate power which is not going to be able to prevent our invasion. Explain how he's a greater menace with less material now.

You deny that the United Nations is practicing collective pacifism?

I always deny a bullshit argument.

The actual texts of resolutions 678 and 687 say nothing about war being the immediate consequence of Iraqi failure to comply.

They authorized consequences. So does the cease-fire of 1991, for that matter.

Sigh... The resolutions did no such fucking thing:

http://www.hwcn.org/link/mkg/app_2.html

http://www.dalebroux.com/assemblage/200 ... on1441.asp

The only resolution which even includes the phrase "serious consequences" is Resolution 1158 and the text clearly does not construct that as a war threat or a war authourisation. The only resolution which specifically authourised war was Resolution 678 —which cleared the way for Operation Desert Storm in 1991. NONE of the post-war resolutions authourise a second war in and of themselves.

According to Czech sources, Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. A Spanish judge recently arrested an al-Qaeda operative whom evidence suggests was linked with the Iraqi embassy in Madrid.

The Czech report was discredited weeks after it had been released. CIA director George Tenet has maintained, on four seperate occasions, that no Iraq/Al-Qaeda link has been proven to exist. How many times must this be said and in how many different ways?

Hussein is no conventional threat – but then again, neither was Afghanistan.

Your argument just grows more and more pathetic with each post. Hussein's military threat against the United States is nil, and his "terrorist threat" isn't even directed against the United States. Afganistan is not comparable, since that country actively hosted Al-Qaeda as it planned a military-style attack against the United States and its Taliban government complicit in conspiracy. The Taliban/Al-Qaeda links were manifestly demonstrated to exist, and the Taliban refused to turn Al-Qaeda over to us when we called upon them to do so after 9-11. Furthermore, the Afganistan operation had full international backing which was secured prior to our launching the air campaign.

The results of UNMOVIC inspections to date do not support your case.

The UNMOVIC inspections have doomed Iraq from a legal point-of-view. Inspectors found evidence of failure to fully disarm. Then the goal-posts were changed and it was insisted that inspectors could somehow root out the complete stockpile of eight and more years and that pulling teeth over a period of months was an acceptable strategy.

So, "failure to fully disarm" is "proliferation", which was what your original charge on this point was. Talk about shifting goalposts. The fact was that inspections and disarmament were working, whether their pace suited you or not. Iraq was penned in, with the entire world watching him, and neutralised.

And once again, Resolution 1441, which authourised UNMOVIC, does not authourise war in and of itself.

Do you even have any fucking clue what "burden of proof" is? WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING PROOF FOR ALL THESE SURMISES OF YOURS?! Not "guess", not "belief", —hard evidence.

You’ve no hard evidence either. You are surmising that he isn’t a threat at all and will not act against us now or in the future. It’s just as much speculation as mine.

Another cute attempt at being clever, but a dumb one. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Absence of evidence is exactly what it says. NO EVIDENCE. People making the charges have the burden of proof to provide said evidence and more so than speculation on what "might" happen "someday". And my "surmise" of Saddam's weakness is based upon what has actually been observed: a war machine which is only at half-strength compared to 1991 and is hard-pressed to hold back the Kurdish insurgency, and a distinct lack of deployment or use of chemical or biological agents in twelve years. Observation, Kast, not "surmise". Learn the difference.

International law is far more than majority opinion, whether you wish to recognise this or not. And the new weapons systems you keep harping on are of anemic capability at best, indeterminate at worst, and were in the process of being destroyed.

You mean like those SCUDs the inspectors were supposed to have picked up? UNMOVIC made token finds, but nothing on the road to total disarmament.

Iraq's SCUDs are antique junk —the damn things were falling to bits just flying over to Israel in 1991, and the Al-Samouds were being destroyed even though the question of whether they could exceed the permissable 150km. range limitation had not been settled.

International law is the dictation of the armed and active. In general it is the majority. It is always self-serving from the point of view of those practicing the enforcement. Whether or not you hold it in esteem is another question entirely.

Sure, right, whatever...

The question is whether Iraq poses an immediate military threat to either the United States or any of the border states in the region, justifying war in accordance to the terms of the Nuremburg Charter and the UN articles. Clearly it does not.

Opinion. Iraq is a clear threat to Israel. This isn’t a question of his conventional power.

The Iraqi "threat" to Israel is laughable. And Iraq has not been able to offer anything more than token support to HAMAS or Hezbollah since the first Gulf War. Both organisations are little better off than the Japanese Red Army at this point. In terms of international law as pertains to the necessary conditions to justify war, the actual military threat is the only criterion which matters. A fact you wish so desperately to dance around since the fact of the matter is that Iraq's military hasn't the capability to threaten anyone, and may not even be able to seriously oppose the present invasion.

Again, your attempt to bring this into the conventional realm smacks of evasion.

No sir, it is you who is evading the issue by trumping up the spectre of Iraq's "nonconventional" threat to justify a war where no other justification exists.

Blix and El-Baradei did their job only from the French and German side of the table.

Is that the side of the table that most of the UN is on?

Hussein was in direct violation of 1441 all along. It was dragged out from inspections to piddling disarmament by the wrong group of people, most of whom only wanted to find the argument against conflict no matter what.

Again, arguments based upon AM radio propaganda have no validity. The eniire purpose of the inspections by UNMOVIC was to determine if Hussein was in violation of UNR 1441. While they found that he was not being fully compliant, nor was it declared that he was in full material breach either. The only person who has made that declaration has been George Bush, who was determined to go to war against Iraq no matter what.

Leaving Hussein in power and free to attack others would have caused more damage from our point of view.

Hussein hasn't free to do dick. Nor capable of doing so either. The rest of your point on this score is specious, self-justifying claptrap.

Saddam Hussein is a pissant little thug who never had the capability to threaten the United States even at his height and certainly does not possess that ability today. Or are you going to argue that he could possibly stop us from overrunning his nation?

The man can aid and abet terrorist activities. He was doing so.

His ability to do even that has been reduced to little more than token support. The reduced operations of HAMAS and Hezbollah in the past several years point clearly to this incapacity. Saddam Hussein has been on a long, slow slide to oblivion since being pushed out of Kuwait and hasn't been able to move beyond his own borders and at present doesn't even have full control of the country.

Has it ever occurred to you that Israeli involvement might destabilize the region as much as our own intervention? And the next threat might be more than Israel can conscience responding to conventionally.

Yet more empty speculation on your part. Given that you've decided to simply ignore Iraq's very evident weakness, that's all you've got left in the tank. Israel's bombing of Tammuz in 1983 did not destabilise the entire region, serious as it was, and we've certainly got the capability to warn Israel of any budding threat Iraq might ever pose to their survival. So has their own Mossad service. Intelligence —part and parcel with deterrence and containment. You also evidently are determined to continue visualising Saddam Hussein as a James Bond supervillan instead of what he actually is —a pissant little thug who is nevertheless smart enough to not undertake any action which would seriously threaten his survival on the throne.

His "proliferation" has been a joke at best, and no worse than the known proliferations of chemical and/or biological weapons from far greater threats upon the international stage such as North Korea. His nuclear capabilities are nonexistent and there is considerable question as to how much useable chemical and biological weapons he actually has in his grasp; due in part to the fact that many of these agents degrade within timeframes of ten years.

North Korea is not open to forced régime-change, or haven’t you noticed?

Meaning that they're not weak enough for us to just steamroll over them like Iraq is. And you maintain that Iraq is a serious threat to us?

Again, Hussein is a threat no matter how much you wish to downplay his stockpile.

A threat is only as good as the stockpile behind it, and Hussein's stockpile is questionable at best.

The UNMOVIC inspectors say otherwise, and Bush's evidence has been laughably thin, to say the least. That is where it hasn't been based upon forged documentation and plagerised college term-papers.

UNMOVIC has uncovered clear violations. And aside from your criticism, Bush has the argument right: there can be no meaningful or total disarmament without régime-change.

UNMOVIC had not uncovered any violation which provides a casus belli for war. Inspections have, quite the opposite, demystified the threat of Iraq and have shown how pathetically weak the country actually is.

It says "might" be able to target troops. Not "can". Blix has made no positive assertion one way or the other, and now will never get the chance to do so.

It’s a chance we’re not willing to take.

That's right; be the mindless parrot for the administration at all costs. Nevermind that the threat posed by Iraq is simply not up to the rhetoric.

Arguments based upon sheer speculation have no validity. Further, the expense to which I referred was in trying to re-machine the tubes to specifications suitable for uranium centrifuges; for which he does not have the capability in the first place.

You mean like your argument hat Hussein is no threat?

No, my argument is based upon what has been actually observed. A fifth-rate war machine equipped with antique junk which has barely managed to control 2/3rds of the country as it is and has been utterly unable to mount any substantive military threat to any state in the region. No observable mass-deployment of alleged WMDs and a non-existent nuclear capability. I'm sorry if you cannot understand the intellectual concept of "testable, provable evidence".

He has the industrial capability to machine the tubes as far as I’ve heard; it’s just prohibitively expensive and makes little sense compared to what a nation with no bans or impositions might have done.

And now you're down to hearsay. Your position just deteriorates ever further. You also evidently cannot provide even a speculation as to why Saddam simply did not attempt to clandestinely import aluminum tubes of sufficent grade and machining to be suitable for uranium centrifuges in the first place.

Pictures on live Al-Jazerra TV of hudreds of dead Iraqi civilians will give them plenty of recruiting material. They got a lot of recruiting material simply from our being in Saudi Arabia for ten years.

Again, kicking in the door on Iraq outweighs the new terrorist threat.

But if the entire point is to stop terrorism, how does a war against a Muslim country which will in fact spark future terrorism serve this aim?

Did you ever stop to think that many of the Iraqis will thank us and thus provide some good PR?

Ah, so the point is to have some momentary good PR and not think of future casualties down the line. Brilliant. You can't even see at this point how much of a joke you're becoming, can you?

Why are we in Saudi Arabia in the first place? There would be far fewer troops without Hussein.

So we justify this war because Bush 41 bungled the last war?

So, if spare-parts are lying around for a particular system, that constitutes evidence that those parts are intended for some other purpose for which they are not suited? Based on what?

With Hussein? It’s an assumption we can’t afford not to make. Especially because, again, he has no prototypes or test-beds. Why are these tubes just “lying around?”

You're just a bear for assuming things, aren't you? "If", "might", "maybe", "possibly"... The artillery rockets in question are a long-established design which had been in production for twenty years. And as for the tubes "lying around", that's sort of what spare-parts tend to do before they're actually utilised.

I think that's why they're called "spare parts".

We are hardly isolated diplomatically. “Illegitimate” from who’s point-of-view? The dissenters? And we can do this alone with our Coalition allies. We’ve got more than we did in 1991 – they’re just not as high-profile.

Very good —your talent for letting your TV do all your thinking for you is shiningly evident.

[Edi]

Patrick, I stand in awe at your resilience in face of Axis Kast's stupidity, but I fear his wall of willful ignorance is too great. He is a stone deaf ferrous cranus, there is no point anymore. Everyone can see how pathetic his arguments are, he's the only one who does not.

Edi

[Stuart Mackey]

Patrick, I stand in awe at your resilience in face of Axis Kast's stupidity, but I fear his wall of willful ignorance is too great. He is a stone deaf ferrous cranus, there is no point anymore. Everyone can see how pathetic his arguments are, he's the only one who does not.

Edi

As I said, he is Darkstar like in his arguments.