re: Bush Press Sec Ari Fleischer tries to "call out Iraq war Myths". Believe him or not?

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You can laugh if you want, but I have friends who directly suffered from what we found and with my own eyes saw evidence, in country.

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Mkay

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You have no fricking clue what you are talking about

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Lolok

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Then you are hanging around the wrong guys...

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I love how every now and then someone will come on here and basically SEAL copypasta before realizing there are dozens and dozens of people on the board with absurd amounts of professional experience in the military and government.

Don't be that guy.

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I’d like to believe I’m wrong, but I can only go by what I see.

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Dude, you just haven't seen the super secret intelligence apparatus that's, like, totally professional and not driven by the bureaucractic nonsense that plagues virtually everything other government institution. Those guys are elite. Nobody has even heard of them, but they've been quietly winning wars and protecting Americans since the NAZIs were trying to invade the US in the 1930s.

I looked at the photos presented by Colin Powell and Condi Rice that purported to show sites with WMD's. I was pissed because the photos they showed were showing detail of about 8' per inch, and the satellites I know are capable of resolving 3" per inch of photo. I was sitting there watching that testimony before Congress and muttering to my wife, "This is total bullshite."

Did any investigative body look into the chances of Saddam offloading weapons to neighboring countries?

I beleive that Iraq did not have WMD's when the war started. I think Saddam probably had some chemical weapons (every dictator over there has a few) but these were either sold to other countries or buried somewhere in the desert.

I dont think Saddam had nukes but probably did whatever he could to make it look like he did. Just the appearance or possibility that someone has those changes the way other countries act. And doing things to give the appearance of having a nuke is cheaper than actually building one.

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I’d like to believe I’m wrong, but I can only go by what I see.

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There are shitbirds everywhere, but that is not indicative of the process as a whole. Ask those guys if they are familiar with the FACT over at AFSOC circa 2010 or so. Best intel operation I’ve ever seen and they were lethal in the AO you are in right now.

You’re an idiot. You’re the joe who talks shite about everything and does nothing. Like I said, I will compare my real world success and my credentials against anyone.

Edit: and you are also the guy saying I didn’t see what I saw and my friends didn’t get sick from what they got sick from...

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Like I said, I will compare my real world success and my credentials against anyone

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Well, in typical Intel guy fashion, you totally misunderstand the context of this conversation, which has nothing to do with you, your credentials, or any one person at all.

But I see your credentials, and am not impressed. I've tripped over a dozen guys with those credentials in a week.

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Can you cite a single credible source that concluded that Saddam did NOT have WMD???

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He most definitely did not have an active weapons program that included biological or nuclear weapons. He did have stockpiles, but we did not care when he used these stockpiles before, against his own people. Why did we care in 2003?

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War is hell - it is an uncertain endeavor - it should not be undertaken foolishly -

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This is exactly what we did. Read the Rumsfeld memos from the Afghan War. Dude had no clue what he was doing.

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Wait - is the IC supposed to be trusted or not??

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In a perfect world, yes. Do you trust our IC apparatus right now?

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Can you imagine the outcry had we done nothing in Iraq, ignoring the IC - and then suffered a massive chemical attack on our forces supporting the Afghanistan operation

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Firstly, we had intel that we were wrong. The French themselves told us that there was no yellowcake uranium, and the British told us that there was no evidence of any biological weapons facility. We ignored the intel of our allies for some reason, because we wanted war.

The likelihood that Hussein would have entered the Afghani theater is so minute it's almost not worth considering. Hussein was surrounded by enemies, hemmed in by Syria and Iran, with no land access to Afghanistan, and with air access severely limited. We knew he had stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, partly because we gave them to him, but those stockpiles, by 2001, were a decade old, if not older.

We certainly weren't prepared for the realities of what post-Saddam Iraq. We weren't prepared when Southern Iraqis worked with their Shia brothers, the Iranians. We weren't prepared for recreating robust institutions in the country, ensuring the country would falter for years and decades to come.