"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
...
In message , Kevin Brooks
writes
"Pete" wrote in message
...
If they could bury an entire MiG-25 (found only by the shifting sands
revealing a tail), what else is buried out there?

Ah, but if we use the analysis method employed by those folks claiming
that
Saddam was not violating the requirements regarding WMD's, then those
Migs
are not evidence of "aircraft", 'cause you have to have at least one
hundred
of them, or more, before you can even *consider* them being "aircraft",
right?

Iraq's large and capable air force is a major and pressing threat that
must be neutralised immediately...

Okay, we found a buried MiG-25, isn't that a "large and capable" air
force?

You need to calibrate your "humor" switch.


A chemical round of a type that Saddam never revealed having *any*
of,

Yet which we knew he was working on.

Which he claimed was R&D only, with no weapons listed as produced from the
effort. This was a weapon. It was not reported. Bad on him; you can defend
Saddam all you want in this regard, but it is clear he did not provide a
"full, final, and complete" accounting of all WMD's he had built, since he
did not report this one. Hence a violation of the terms he was supposed to
be operating under.


maybe developed as a product of an R&D effort that post-dated 687,

Or that predated 687.

Big question mark. Saddam did not declare any rounds produced of this nature
at any time--being as his disclosures did include some pretty "low density"
items (numbers in the single and double digits for other systems), then why
was this left out? Neither UNSCOM nor the later UNMOVIC were able to reach
any kind of definitive conclusion about exactly *what* the Iraqis had or had
not been able to do, or did, in terms of manufacturing 155mm binary rounds.
Interestingly, Saddam did not see fitt to even acknowledge the R&D effort
(which he was required to do) until after it was discovered via some
documentaion by UNSCOM inspectors. But hey, you still want to defend him
here, right?


an
alleged mustard round,

Because out of 200,000 rounds produced, one round turning up is absolute
proof?

Back to the old, "How many weapons does a violation make?" argument, eh?


Do I scent desperation here?

No, you scent disbelief that folks are still trying to defend Saddam and
claim that he was not guilty of continuing proscribed WMD activities, or of
hiding those that he had already conducted and wanted to keep out of sight.



From "Hussein may be exporting kilotons of WME to his US-hating
neigbbours" we're down to "we've found one or two decade-old shells".

That would be your quote, I presume? I mean, we all now know how willing you
are to doctor/create a quote and assign it to another poster, right?


There were supposedly vast factories and stockpiles of chemical and/or
biological weapons. It seems our intelligence was incorrect, since those
vast stockpiles and the factories that produced them remain elusive.

Our intel in those regards may indeed have been incorrect. But that does not
change the FACT that Saddam was violating the requirements set forth before
him. Gee, I wonder *why* he was so interested in ricin, which is admittedly
not likely to be the best of battlefield agents, but would likely perform
nicely if used by terrorist types, or his own intel folks (you remember, the
same guys who were implicated in that kill-the-former-President scheme?).



The claim was that there was a clear and obvious threat. Where was it?

Saddam continuing to work towards proscribed goals is good enough for me. I
personally don't think he was the kind of guy I'd want to be controlling
*any* WMD's, in whatever quantities; you may differ, but I could care less
to be honest. Then of course there were the other (non-WMD) related reasons
for conducting this operation--the ones that you can't seem to understand do
indeed exist?

What made Iraq so special compared to more evident proliferators and
producers of WME?

I asked eighteen months ago and never got an answer.

Because your question remains as stupid now as it was then--and yes, you got
an answer, you just can't seem to (or more accurately don't want to) grasp
it. No standard playbook for handling threats/potential threats in the
geopolitical realm--it is all situationally dependent. I suspect you can
understand that, but apparently as usual you just find it easier to ignore
the obvious in your quest to, for some unknown reason, defend Saddam as the
poor whipping boy. BTW, did you notice that the Saudis have again been in
AQ's target ring? You remember--the country that IIRC you were claiming was
more of a threat to the US and more deserving of US action than Iraq?

Brooks