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Chilcot Report


Chindie

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4 minutes ago, snowychap said:

It did.

Implicit in the question that I asked was my opinion (i.e. that they weren't the best people).

OK. So if not America, who?

Yes yes I know, Team America : World Police's foreign policy stinks. But sometimes in order to hammer a nail you need, well, a hammer. 

For me this is like one of those decision trees - Does Saddam Hussein need to go? Yes... from there I'm kinda lost but I can't then argue that they committed a war crime. I find the idea absolutely ridiculous... I do agree for sure is that they, namely the United States of America as the controlling force, botched it. 

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22 minutes ago, dont_do_it_doug. said:

@chrisp65

Tell me, what was the middle ground? Saddam point blank refused to play ball. He would never have let the inspectors have the free reign they needed, certainly not without railroading them which would have completely nullified their purpose. 

 

I obviously don't have any great handle on the region and it's tribalism. But I know enough, to that I don't know enough.

The version we were sold was a very dangerous man, he could attack in 45 minutes, he needs to be stopped 'today'. When in reality, that Robin Cook statement says quite a lot about our mixed up thinking. If he had weapons and know how, it was only what we'd sold him twenty years previously. If he was a genuine imminent danger to us all, why did we think he was so weak we could put together an army on a budget to topple him.

I understand that we can't police the whole world. We can't get rid of Putin, we can't force democracy on China. But for some reason we fixated on Saddam Hussein and talked ourselves in to believing that getting rid of him was the top middle and bottom of our problems. It so obviously wasn't.

Why couldn't we wait another 3 months? What would have changed? Why couldn't we persuade any of his staff that if he was gone, they could be funded like Egypt or tolerated like Burma on a very very slow move towards what the west wanted? 

There was a strong element of lashing out in revenge by the USA, coupled with Blair writing to Bush and promising to be by his side whatever. We decided that politically, we needed to be best mates with Bush's USA. Whatever they chose to do. That's a ridiculous position to put your country and its servicemen in. Poorly equipped, no plan, but a promise to follow Bush over the top. There is definitely negligence or bloodlust there, for what? The hope of some pay off? Cheaper fighter aircraft in the future? Better trade? A lucrative talk circuit deal?

The situation was contained within Iraq's own borders. Nothing new was happening that we hadn't seen for many years. But our best mate was bursting for a fight.

Years earlier, Israel had all but demolished Iraq's nuclear ability with bombing. If we were so sure we knew where the WMD was, why didn't we simply raise those areas to the ground. Plus a couple of palaces. Absolutely no need for full invasion. Why dismantle a country's entire infrastructure? Revenge. Worse, knowingly misplaced revenge.

The lack of any plan for 'day 2' tells me that Blair wasn't considering the greater good of the Iraqi people as he still claims today. It doesn't take a genius to work out a country needs electricity and food supplies, law and order. When Germany was dismantled after WW2, we didn't leave them grubbing around in the dirt shooting each other for food. We knew the country would be more harmful left as some Lord of the Flies experiment. So we kept a police force, we organised power and got people to work. Then stepped back. Why couldn't we imagine such a path for Iraq? If Germany is too different an example, how about Sierra Leone?  We didn't bomb that to the ground and then leave hoping for the best. Revenge. Revenge on a budget.

We could have sponsored a UN force to be ready. The UN is far from a brilliant peace keeper. But given the choice of UN police or some Mad Max zombie apocalypse, I'd head for the UN zone.

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5 hours ago, TrentVilla said:

Yet there is no actual evidence to support this accusation.

Sir John Scarlett told Blair the evidence of Iraq WMD was 'patchy.' Blair told Parliament the evidence of Iraq WMD was 'authoritative.' That's a lie.

Blair said Saddam was enriching uranium in Niger. The Bush adminstration refused to support this allegation. Or 'lie', which it was.

We didn't invade Iraq because he gassed Kurds. We didn't care much if he had WMD either. The policy was containment even after the first Gulf War. He could sit on WMD all day as far as we were concerned, just don't use them.

Not only that, but Bush and Blair offered to let Saddam stay in power if he gave up his WMD. Now they say it was right to remove him. Which is it? More lies.

9/11 bred the idea that Saddam was now a present threat to the West. This required linking him to 9/11 to ensure an attack on Iraq would enjoy legitimacy. That was false and they knew it. A Blair memo with Bush revealed by Chilcot clearly shows that Blair told Bush the evidence of Saddam's links to 9/11 were 'tenuous at best.'

A bunch of Saudi hijackers had nothing to do with Saddam. Bush and Blair knew it. It was like linking the Thai tsunami to Lockerbie.

A key US source for Saddam's WMD programme was an Iraqi called 'Curveball.' You can guess how trustworthy they knew he was from his codename.

In Richard Clarke's book (he was an advisor to Rumsfeld at the time of 9/11) he said that within a few weeks of 9/11, Rumsfeld asked for evidence linking Saddam to 9/11. Evidence to draw a conclusion, or a conclusion to draw some evidence?

Why not try linking Bin Laden? He was behind a previous Twin Towers bombing. Perhaps he might be a viable suspect? But members of the Bin Laden family were allowed to fly from US airspace the day after 9/11 without any questioning.

Why not try linking the Saudis? Most of the hijackers were Saudi.

Where was there one shred of evidence that Saddam was involved in 9/11? None.

The idea Saddam would have attacked the US or the UK was preposterous. If he attacked the US - or attempted to - the US would have turned Iraq into glass. He knew it. The US-hating was all for domestic consumption.

The reality is that the Bush adminstration hated Saddam and 9/11 was their opportunity. With Blair, they didn't care about the blowback that would occur. Never waste a crisis.

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1 hour ago, dont_do_it_doug. said:

OK. So if not America, who?

I don't know.

You say: Does Saddam need to go? Yes.

Who are you asking and who is saying yes? If it's you asking that question (and answering it) as a hypothetical then it's a vastly different starting point for a discussion than if the people asking the question and answering it are the same countries that were happy to have him there on Monday but decided they didn't want him come the end of the week.

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10 hours ago, TrentVilla said:

Yet there is no actual evidence to support this accusation.

Well how do you prove a negative (i.e. that he had no wmds)? Perhaps you could have a bunch of neutral, say UN, inspectors going round doing inspecting of all the places where the intelligence claimed they were/might be, plus other surprise visits and inspections? what's that? oh - this was being done!. What, Bush had already decided to act before it got too hot, and so set an arbitrary date against the wishes of the inspectors and then just went ahead and invaded anyway.

So for all Saddam was unco-operative in a making it easy for the inspectors, they were still getting on with it. They found nothing, zilch.

Then there was storming' norman going to the UN with a bunch of made up bullshit and the same from the Uk in parliament, with the 45 mins rubbish. The French concluded Saddam had destroyed all his WMDs and opposed the war.

So I don't agree wit that defence.

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8 hours ago, dont_do_it_doug. said:

Let me flip the question because I've already answered as deeply as I care to at this stage as to why I think Saddam needed to be removed, do others think he should have been left in power? If so, what do you think the consequences would have been? What would have happened had he continued to ignore UN sanctions? Should they have gone "ok Saddam, you crack on son"?

The consequences of doing so are unknown, obviously. The consequences of potting him, including al the stuff that's since happened were predicted by the security services and others. They were just kept from the public and ignored by Blair and Bush. They knowingly unleashed the catastrophe that has subsequently occurred.

If they had chosen to carry on sanctions, or to squeeze tighter, or to do zilch, or to do whatever, it's unlucky in the extreme to have gone more badly than the course of action they took.

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5 hours ago, dont_do_it_doug. said:

Should we have held off until he started gassing Kurds again?

He didn't have any gas. The inspections were doing their job. The pressure from the UN (before undermined by the war) was working.

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5 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Revenge. Revenge on a budget

And lots of contracts for Halliburton, lots of oil, lots of money going into dirty pockets, by the eft-ton. It was way more than revenge. it was zealously driven ideological neocon imperialism, mixed with greed....and revenge was the key that started the bus.

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19 minutes ago, blandy said:

Then there was storming' norman going to the UN with a bunch of made up bullshit

Fat Norm was golfing pigeons in his local park at the time, the guy who they sent to the UN was Colin Powell, who proceeded to make the case for the invasion, even though he doubted the veracity of the intelligence he was provided. That's because there was none. The "Yellow Cake", the "Meeting in Prague"...all proven lies.

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9 hours ago, dont_do_it_doug. said:

Let me flip the question because I've already answered as deeply as I care to at this stage as to why I think Saddam needed to be removed, do others think he should have been left in power? If so, what do you think the consequences would have been? What would have happened had he continued to ignore UN sanctions? Should they have gone "ok Saddam, you crack on son"?

Do I think in retrospect that alternative action should have been taken, with the full backing of the UN, or at the very least a proper reconstruction plan laid out in advance for post Saddam Iraq? Yes, obviously. They had time. Blair lacked the balls to tell America to hold off for ten, for **** sake. However I'm not going to let hindsight, as bloody and vicious as it has been, cloud my opinion that he needed to go. As quickly and as efficiently as possible.

I disagree with the entire premise of the questions to be honest. I don't believe it is any of our business who ran Iraq, at least up until such point as the government of Iraq attacked a treaty ally, which it never did. 

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