Iraq/Al-Qaeda connection?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/05/AR2007040502263.html?hpid=topnews

 

Thanks for the analysis TVBrain.

And why are the titles of the thread and the article different?

 

Well I am going to assume for a minute that you are of the opinion that Iraq "had' weapons of mass destruction (15 year old un-operational weapons right?) and that Saddam/Iraq had ties to Al-Qaeda that required our invasion. correct?

The title of the thread was a question. The article that accompanies is just more declassified information showing this administration's desire to go to war. This desire was backed by manipulated intelligence, in this case fellow PNAC member Feith.

 

You are correct, he did still have the WMD's that he used in the Iran-Iraq War, against the Kurds in northern Iraq, and against his own people during a futile resistance against the Iraqi government. That's not why we went to war, and everyone knows it. We thought that he was developing newer more lethal WMDs including nukes.

We know he had a nuclear power plant that was almost unquestionably working on building nuclear weapons, until Israel destroyed it (in one of the greatest aviation missions of all time) and we thought he had once again continued to pursue nuclear weapons.

We have yet to find these weapons, but that doesn't mean that he didn't have them. A number of high ranking officials in Saddam's former air force claim that he had them transported to Syria in 2002, before the U.S. landed in Iraq.

What I'm trying to get at is that Saddam does not equal Iraq. There are unquestionably Iraq/al Qaedaties, but the Saddam/al Qaeda ties are less clear (though there certainly is some evidence, nothing too convincing). Saddam did give support to certain Sunni terrorists (abu Nidal), though not necessarily al Qaeda (although Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi, and Zawhiri are all Sunni terrorists).

Furthermore, it has become more and more clear that Iraq supplied how-to manuals for Arab operatives working throughout Afghanistan before 9/11, and provided military assistance to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

No one knows for sure...

 

correction we NEEDED to think he was developng WMD, and many arms of the united states gov't twisted and manipulated the intelligence to get the DESIRED outcome.

Plenty of declassified white house, pentagon, defense department, etc papers paint the true picture. an administration that WANTED war. and administration that needed public opinion swayed for war. an administration that was willing to bend the truth and lie to forward it's neo-conservative foreign policy.

what makes it so much worse is how naive they were about it. I specifically recall Wolfowitz on the Senate floor telling Congress that the war would pay for itself. the only good thing to come from any of this so far is that it has effectively ended the neo-con movement in washington. you certainly won't be seeing the Rumsfelds, Feiths, Wolfowitzs, Armitages in any of the upcoming adminstrations. and thank god for that.

 

Saddam and Iraq deliberately made it seem like they were developing nuclear weapons in order to intimidate Iran, in addition to myriad other evidence that supported this theory.

Just because we haven't discovered any nukes doesn't mean that the President lied.

 

Lets not forget the chemical weapons recovered in Iraq after the invasion. U.S. forces recovered over 500 pre-gulf war era chemical and biological weapons. While this does not prove an ongoing program, it does prove that Saddam lied when he said he had disposed of all illigal weapons. We also have to keep in mind that while these chemicals had degraded, that does not mean that they are not deadly. Nerve toxins don't go from deadly agents to baking powder overnight.

http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/Iraq_WMD_Declassified.pdf

This report does not include the tons pesticides and dual-use chemicals found in Iraq. Many critics have claimed that these could have many different uses, and do not prove a weapons program, but when you find them in military bunkers, next to surface-to-surface missiles, with gas masks, next to mobile chemical labs designed to mix the precursor agents, it doesn't take a genious to figure out what the true intention of these chemicals was. Let's not forget that the 4th Infantry Division came upon a 55-gallon drum containing cyclosarin (do a little research on what that stuff is used for).

http://www.khouse.org/enews_article/2006/1083

Since all of these chemicals are considered to be weapons of mass destruction, yeah, I'd have to say that I do believe that Saddam was in possession of WMDs before the war.