Quote Originally Posted by Tribesman
Feel free , perhaps you could explain why 4 years into the mess you still cling to long disproven "facts" .
You have actualty reviewed the findings many commissions have made of "all of the intelligence" you claim points in certain directions ?
Though it would appear from what you wrote that you most certainly havn't reviewed any of it
Ok. I'll start with the worn out arguments that everyone has heard a million times: The intelligence agencies of the world thought the WMDs were there, Hussein had a history of using WMDs, and he continuously refused to allow the U.N. folks to carry out the inspections that were imposed on his country.

So, the U.S. decides to go to war, and when they show up there are no WMDs.

People start throwing together blue ribbon commissions. The commisssions speculate about the possible reasons no WMDs were found. The most spectacular and potentially damning speculations are trumpeted by the liberal crowd.

Backing up just a bit to the time between the invasion and the commissions, I was patrolling Baghdad starting on Easter Sunday of 2003 as an M.P. Thousands of Iraqi's smiled, cheered, waved, and wanted to shake our hands as we drove through the city. People fell all over themselves to take us to schools and other public buildings and show us the stockpiles of weapons Hussein had emplaced, expecting his people to rise up against us. Some of the people volunteering such information were members of the Iraqi military who had simply gone home rather than fight us. One of those soldiers spoke very good English, and was hired as an interpreter for my plattoon. When he told me that he had helped load chemical weapons onto trucks during the run up to the invasion, I didn't get too excited. I had already gotten excited when two other Iraqis had given me similar firsthand accounts. I was stunned when, after passing this information up the chain of command, I was told that it didn't concern me, they already had this information, and I shouldn't worry about it.

I didn't have access to any blue ribbon commission reports on the internet, so I just exercised my own meager mind a little bit and figured, "Hmmm, if we were willing to invade Iraq for those WMDs, and we start making noise about the fact that they are in Syria (or Iran or wherever), then we would have a hard time explaining why we aren't invading THEM. It could be that the Pres. is planning a different approach to that problem, or it could just be that he's used up all of his political clout getting this war off the ground, and can't afford another one." In any case, it was above my paygrade, I had done my duty, and I had enough on my plate with trying to accomplish my own missions.

So, the reason I still "cling" to those facts is that A: they haven't been disproven, as you claim, and B: I took statements from eyewitnesses who independently told similar stories about the removal of WMDs shortly before the invasion. At the time, the removal of the WMDs was "common knowledge" on the street in Iraq. I can only assume that the reasons for not going public with the information outweigh the political consequences President Bush faces when the left, and their media outlets, spend all their time screaming that he is a liar.

I'm sure you'll want to respond to this. I already feel that I've gone out on a limb as far as hijacking a thread, so I won't respond any more on this subject in this thread. If you would like to discuss this further, you may PM me or start a new thread, and we can ask the mods to move our posts to that one.