Saddam was working on and had WMDs.

[ironmonk]

Here is a document from the UN. Please be sure to note pages 14 & 15...
[url="http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/new/documents/quarterly_reports/s-2004-435.pdf"]http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/new/docume.../s-2004-435.pdf[/url]

Saddam had WMD's. Why are there so many news outlets and democrats that ignore the facts in the case? Use your imagination. It just goes to show the integrity level of those in question.

This topic is recently in the news again because of recent ignorant attacks on Bush at King's memorial service, people need to know the truth.

Saddam killed millions of his own people. Do you really think he wasn't trying to achieve WMD's or if he didn't actually have them?

Saddam and the UN issue is the same type of issue as if a drug dealer gives a cop a hard time to search his car when he gets stopped for a traffic violation... he has drugs hidden. There is no reasonable doubt in a case like this or like Saddams.


God Bless,
ironmonk

[Snarf]

The "millions" part I find a bit far-fetched. Sources?

[Norseman82]

[quote name='Snarf' date='Feb 7 2006, 02:51 PM']The "millions" part I find a bit far-fetched.  Sources?
[right][snapback]879148[/snapback][/right]
[/quote]

It is a UN document.

[Snarf]

Which is about a totally different subject.

Yes, I know genocide did take place and was very serious. Which just makes it hypocritical for the GOP to have opposed the bombings of Milosevic (of which I generally disagree with anyways).

[avemaria40]

why does it make it hypocritical?

[Iacobus]

Because he was doing ethinic cleansing and that is what they are pinning as Saddam.

[jezic]

i wonder, is a country full of people who are fanatically loyal to a cause and possible terrorists a wmd, if so then who could deny that iraq had them?

[ironmonk]

Million's "far fetched" - Why does that sound so far fetched? If you would have studied the man, I think that you would know that it's not.



[url="http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0602070235feb07,1,6453318.story?coll=chi-technology-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true"]http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/c...ack=1&cset=true[/url]

Sad yet funny that there were more civilian deaths in Iraq before the war with Iraq.


[url="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-12/09/content_288443.htm"]http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-1...tent_288443.htm[/url]


Since the following article requires people to sign up, I'll just past the whole thing here....

It's easy to see that the exact number of deaths that Saddam is directly responsible for will never be certain, but it's well into the seven digets.

[quote]How Many People Has Hussein Killed?
By JOHN F. BURNS


n the unlit blackness of an October night, it took a flashlight to pick them out: rust-colored butchers' hooks, 20 or more, each four or five feet long, aligned in rows along the ceiling of a large hangar-like building. In the grimmest fortress in Iraq's gulag, on the desert floor 20 miles west of Baghdad, this appeared to be the grimmest corner of all, the place of mass hangings that have been a documented part of life under Saddam Hussein.

At one end of the building at Abu Ghraib prison, a whipping wind gusted through open doors. At the far end, the flashlight picked out a windowed space that appeared to function as a control room. Baggy trousers of the kind worn by many Iraqi men were scattered at the edges of the concrete floor. Some were soiled, as if worn in the last, humiliating moments of a condemned man's life.

The United States is facing a new turning point in its plans to go to war to topple Mr. Hussein, with additional American troops heading for the Persian Gulf, while France and Germany lead the international opposition. But the pressure President Bush has applied already has created chances to peer into the darkest recesses of Iraqi life.

In the past two months, United Nations weapons inspections, mandated by American insistence that Mr. Hussein's pursuit of banned weapons be halted, have ranged widely across the country. But before this became the international community's only goal, Mr. Bush was also attacking Mr. Hussein as a murdering tyrant. It was this accusation that led the Iraqi leader to virtually empty his prisons on Oct. 20, giving Western reporters, admitted that day to Abu Ghraib, a first-hand glimpse of the slaughterhouse the country has become.

In the end, if an American-led invasion ousts Mr. Hussein, and especially if an attack is launched without convincing proof that Iraq is still harboring forbidden arms, history may judge that the stronger case was the one that needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbors.

Reporters who were swept along with tens of thousands of near-hysterical Iraqis through Abu Ghraib's high steel gates were there because Mr. Hussein, stung by Mr. Bush's condemnation, had declared an amnesty for tens of thousands of prisoners, including many who had served long sentences for political crimes. Afterward, it emerged that little of long-term significance had changed that day. Within a month, Iraqis began to speak of wide-scale re-arrests, and officials were whispering that Abu Ghraib, which had held at least 20,000 prisoners, was filling up again.

Like other dictators who wrote bloody chapters in 20th-century history, Mr. Hussein was primed for violence by early childhood. Born into the murderous clan culture of a village that lived off piracy on the Tigris River, he was harshly beaten by a brutal stepfather. In 1959, at age 22, he made his start in politics as one of the gunmen who botched an attempt to assassinate Iraq's first military ruler, Abdel Karim Kassem.

Since then, Mr. Hussein's has been a tale of terror that scholars have compared to that of Stalin, whom the Iraqi leader is said to revere, even if his own brutalities have played out on a small scale. Stalin killed 20 million of his own people, historians have concluded. Even on a proportional basis, his crimes far surpass Mr. Hussein's, but figures of a million dead Iraqis, in war and through terror, may not be far from the mark, in a country of 22 million people.

Where the comparison seems closest is in the regime's mercilessly sadistic character. Iraq has its gulag of prisons, dungeons and torture chambers — some of them acknowledged, like Abu Ghraib, and as many more disguised as hotels, sports centers and other innocent-sounding places. It has its overlapping secret-police agencies, and its culture of betrayal, with family members denouncing each other, and offices and factories becoming hives of perfidy.

"Enemies of the state" are eliminated, and their spouses, adult children and even cousins are often tortured and killed along with them.

Mr. Hussein even uses Stalinist maxims, including what an Iraqi defector identified as one of the dictator's favorites: "If there is a person, then there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem."

There are rituals to make the end as terrible as possible, not only for the victims but for those who survive. After seizing power in July 1979, Mr. Hussein handed weapons to surviving members of the ruling elite, then joined them in personally executing 22 comrades who had dared to oppose his ascent.

The terror is self-compounding, with the state's power reinforced by stories that relatives of the victims pale to tell — of fingernail-extracting, eye-gouging, genital-shocking and bucket-drowning. Secret police rape prisoners' wives and daughters to force confessions and denunciations. There are assassinations, in Iraq and abroad, and, ultimately, the gallows, the firing squads and the pistol shots to the head.

DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths attributable to Mr. Hussein's regime resulted from the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its own toll was 500,000, and Iran's reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Iraq's official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 — surely a gross exaggeration — but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein's forces from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and occupation in their country.

Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr. Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the huge toll is palpable nonetheless.

Just as in Stalin's Russia, the machinery of death is mostly invisible, except for the effects it works on those brushed by it — in the loss of relatives and friends, and in the universal terror that others have of falling into the abyss. If anybody wants to know what terror looks like, its face is visible every day on every street of Iraq.

"Minders," the men who watch visiting reporters day and night, are supposedly drawn from among the regime's harder men. But even they break down, hands shaking, eyes brimming, voices desperate, when reporters ask ordinary Iraqis edgy questions about Mr. Hussein.

"You have killed me, and killed my family," one minder said after a photographer for The New York Times made unauthorized photographs of an exhibition of statues of the Iraqi dictator during a November visit to Baghdad's College of Fine Arts. In recent years, the inexorable nature of Iraq's horrors have been demonstrated by new campaigns bearing the special hallmark of Mr. Hussein. In 1999, a complaint about prison overcrowding led to an instruction from the Iraqi leader for a "prison cleansing" drive. This resulted, according to human rights groups, in hundreds, and possibly thousands, of executions.

Using a satanic arithmetic, prison governors worked out how many prisoners would have to be hanged to bring the numbers down to stipulated levels, even taking into account the time remaining in the inmates' sentences. As 20 and 30 prisoners at a time were executed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, warders trailed through cities like Baghdad, "selling" exemption from execution to shocked families, according to people in Iraq who said they had spoken to relatives of those involved. Bribes of money, furniture, cars and even property titles brought only temporary stays.

MORE recently, according to Iraqis who fled to Jordan and other neighboring countries, scores of women have been executed under a new twist in a "return to faith" campaign proclaimed by Mr. Hussein. Aimed at bolstering his support across the Islamic world, the campaign led early on to a ban on drinking alcohol in public. Then, some time in the last two years, it widened to include the public killing of accused prostitutes.

Often, the executions have been carried out by the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary group headed by Mr. Hussein's oldest son, 38-year-old Uday. These men, masked and clad in black, make the women kneel in busy city squares, along crowded sidewalks, or in neighborhood plots, then behead them with swords. The families of some victims have claimed they were innocent of any crime save that of criticizing Mr. Hussein.
[url="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/weekinreview/26JOHN.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=a4ebaa39d1d0ffc1&ex=1139461200"]http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/weekinre...1&ex=1139461200[/url]
[/quote]


God Bless,
ironmonk

[Snarf]

So, a war fought over border disputes constitutes genocide? Sure, it's not nice, but the roots of the Iraq-Iran War date back to the 8th Century. You can't blame Hussein for those casualties, since Iraq was rabbid as an entire country for desire to invade Iran.

[Mercy me]

A war over border disputes constitutes genocide? What? During Desert Storm the US and more than 40 allies removed Saddam's army from the entire country of Kuwait where they had raped, murdered and plungered as much as possible. It was not a "border dispute". It was a land grab. At the end of the week Saddam's representatives signed a surrender and agreed to certain conditions among those were access for the UN weapons inspectors which you will recall he restricted at every turn before finally throwing them out of the country which violated the peace agreement and techicnically was grounds for the resumption of war on Iraq. Which you recall did not happen. All that happened were more Security Council repremands and "or else" statements.

As to Saddam's genocide attempts lets start with the Kurds in the North on whom he used chemical weapons (please show me evidence that his remaining stockpiles were distroyed), the Marsh Arabs - not only did he kill them he tried to drain the marsh which has caused horrendous environmental damage, and the Shites in the south near Basara. He killed hundreds of them after they rose against him. That was only three groups that he tried to exterminate.

[smeagol]

[quote name='ironmonk' date='Feb 7 2006, 02:29 PM']
Saddam and the UN issue is the same type of issue as if a drug dealer gives a cop a hard time to search his car when he gets stopped for a traffic violation... he has drugs hidden.
[/quote]

Israel violated more UN resolutions than Iraq did. is this reason enough for massive, prolonged invasion?!

North Korea kicked weapons inspectors out! try kicking the FBI or DEA out of your house!

Iran is blatantly opposing the world concerning its nuclear capabilities as well.

the solution is clearly NOT invasion and a war with no end in sight.

[ironmonk]

snarf,

You are pulling for straws... and it appears that you don't read.

The war was because Saddam had WMD's and would not comply. He needed to be taken out for all the other reasons as well.

We should have went into the Sudan and cleaned house too... but too many selfish people in America do not care about the third world countries. Like the people that want us out of Iraq now before they are on their feet... selfish. Less people are dying on a daily basis than before Saddam was taken out. We're building dozens of hosptials, we're teaching them the help themselves, etc...

The war is over, we won, and now it's a humanitarian effort. Part of that effort is battling terrorists while we help them. If the terrorist would stop attacking, they would get rid of us quicker.

[Cow of Shame]

[quote name='Mercy me' date='Feb 8 2006, 01:00 AM']During Desert Storm the US and more than 40 allies removed Saddam's army from the entire country of Kuwait where they [snip] plungered as much as possible. 
[/quote]
Can they come do [i]my[/i] toilets too?

[Winchester]

"A war with no end in sight"

Welcome to planet earth.
We're winning and will continue to do so so long as we don't undercut the war (which we did in Vietnam.)

We don't attack countries simply because they violate UN resolutions, and we can't afford to attack every country.

We're also not perfect.

I support the attack on Iraq. I'm glad Saddam is out of power. I hope it turns out well; it might not. We might end up with someone worse, ultimately. Such is life. Might there have been other targets more worthy? I am willing to entertain the notion.

Attack Korea? Competent military. High casualty rate for our soldiers. Bad decision right now.

Attack Israel? They've been fighting a war forever. As a Catholic, I believe God Himself gave them their land. They shoud beaver dam well have it.

[RandomProddy]

Saddam [i]was[/i] a WMD.