When you're grasping at straws, why not just go for the whole broom?Y'all may recall that as recently as last week, Senator Rick (eewww) Santorum was smacked down by the world's wimpiest TV Personality, wutzisname colms on Fox News for making spurious claims that the US Military had found WMDs in Iraq. The military disavowed (eeewww) Santorum's claim.
Apparently, Congressional Republicans, desperate to scrape some good news out of the nation's greatest strategic blunder, won't let the (ewww) Santorum, lie die.
The U.S. military has found more Iraqi weapons in recent months, in addition to the 500 chemical munitions recently reported by the Pentagon, a top defense intelligence official said on Thursday.
Senate Dems aren't buying it, and the military isn't sounding any alarm bells:
But despite statements of concern by Republicans about the risk of terrorists releasing the chemical in the United States, defense officials said the munitions pose as much a threat to people who try to handle them as potential victims.When asked by a Democrat to confirm the weapons pose a risk to troops in Iraq, not Americans at home, Maples said, "Yes."
Republican lawmakers, some facing tough election battles amid growing anti-war sentiment, called the discovery of the weapons significant.
[...]
But Democrats dismissed such arguments and said the weapons were not the "imminent threat" used to justify the war.
"It's very difficult to characterize these as the imminent threat weapons that we were told we were looking for," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher a California Democrat.
Apparently, the stuff the Military is finding is no more dangerous than Clorox...
Salon related this hysterical interchange between a House Republican and our top Weapons Inspector:
What's more, Kay said, the decades-old sarin nerve gas was probably no more dangerous than household pesticides -- and far more likely to degrade at room temperature. "In terms of toxicity, sir," Kay told Weldon at one point, "I suspect in your house, and I know in my house, I have things that are more toxic than sarin produced from 1984 to 1988."These were not the facts Weldon wanted to hear. The House member quickly lost his cool. "There is nothing under my sink that could be classified as a weapon of mass destruction or violate the Chemical Weapons Convention," he thundered. "I think that is the kind of irresponsible statement that causes these kind of misperceptions out there. It's the kind of generalization that, in my opinion, is just plain stupid."
The high-minded hearing, which began with dialogue straight out of "Dragnet," ended with Weldon insulting the intelligence of the nation's top weapons inspector. To his credit, Kay did not respond.
So why did we go to war in Iraq? Was it to save the nation from a Clorox bomb?
Let's ask George Walker Bush.
Here he is in 1999, talking about his glee at the possibility he could wage war on his dad's old enemy:
Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography."He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade+é-+.if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."
So was it clorox or was it politics? You decide. I've got to go scrub the tub.
Al Franken labeled it a 'Weapon of Mild Discomfort'
It was from Afghanistan that al Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks. And Osama bin Laden mocks us from mountains of Pakistan.
What exactly did Iraq do to us?
Nothing. It was a secular society without a will to fight. Therefore it was easy to topple. We went in there, just as Reagan went to Grenada, because it was thought to be a cheap and easy win.
And it was. Unfortunately, the idiots who run our foreign policy thought they had to occupy it as well. That is proving harder and more expensive to do.
So expensive that our real national security is being immeasurably compromised.
I'm not a dove. I'm a militant hawk who thinks the idiots invaded the wrong country and engaged the wrong war.
$500 Billion spent so that we could lose our leadership position in the world.
We could have saved a bunch of money and appointed Bill Bennett Ambassador to the UN.
Woops... better not give the neocons any ideas.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/nationalsecurity/disarm.html
Here is the White House case to 'Disarm Saddam Hussein' from April 18, 2003:
April 18, 2003
Disarm Saddam Hussein
The gravest danger we face in the war on terror is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
* Twelve years ago, Saddam Hussein agreed to disarm all weapons of mass destruction. For 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement.
* Three months ago, the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam his final chance to disarm. He has shown his utter contempt for the U.N.
* The U.N. and U.S. intelligence sources have known for some time that Saddam Hussein has materials to produce chemical and biological weapons, but he has not accounted for them:
* - 26,000 liters of anthrax—enough to kill several million people
* - 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin
* - 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents* Almost 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents
* From three Iraqi defectors, we know that Iraq in the late 1990s had several mobile biological weapons labs. But he has not disclosed them.
* The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, a design for a nuclear weapon, and was working on methods of enriching uranium for a nuclear bomb. He recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, according to the British Government. He has attempted to purchase high strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons, according to our intelligence sources. Yet he has not credibly explained these activities.
* Thousands of Iraqi security personnel are at work hiding documents and materials from the UN inspectors.
* Iraqi officials accompany all inspectors in order to intimidate witnesses.
* Iraq is blocking U-2 surveillance flights requested by the U.N.
* Saddam Hussein has ordered that scientists who cooperate with the UN be killed, along with their families.
* Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including al-Qaida members. He could provide hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own. It would take just one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.
The United States will ask the UN Security Council to convene next week to consider the facts of Iraq’s ongoing defiance of the world. We will consult. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm, we will act for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world.
Hmmm, I can't seem to find the part about spreading democracy or fighting them there so we don't... yada yada yada.
His theory is that we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was going to start accepting Euros rather than Dollars for oil (putting further downward pressure on the Dollar and triggering more inflation). Iran is also threatening to switch to Euros.
For Decades the Dollar has been unchallenged as the universal currency in the world giving the US a kind of economic empire, this is changing with the introduction of the Euro.
The stabilizing force of the Dollar, in spite of massive trade deficits and an expanding national debt, has been that other nations have needed to buy and stockpile Dollars to purchase oil from OPEC due to our symbiotic relationship with Saudi Arabia. If Iraq, Iran, or another nation with huge oil reserves such as Venezuela were to begin accepting Euros (or any other currency) instead of Dollars Europe, China, Japan, and any other nation with large Dollar reserves might start dumping them with huge repercussions for the US (none of them good).
The Bush administration is using terrorism and WMD as a cover for military action to prevent this.
Scary stuff... buy more gold (shiny rocks).
I still don't think we'll invade Iran because our military is just stretched too thin. We need to get a new administration in place for 2008 so we can stablize our spending and decrease our deficit to others.