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Reading Politics

Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) have come to the forefront of world politics over the last few months as the result of the Iraq crisis. The Bush administration has come to the conclusion that WMDs pose the greatest threat to the world today (this is probably true... the destructive power of these weapons is unmatched); however, it has broken with American tradition by choosing to preemptively strike any nation even suspected of having these weapons. This is where I strongly disagree with the Administration. I believe that the Administration is being stronly hypocritical in using WMDs as a pretense for attacking Iraq, but ignoring the much larger WMD threat in North Korea. Even after North Korea declared its nuclear weapons last week, the Administration chose to do nothing: if Iraq had made any such threat, we would have pounced upon it immediately. It has been a couple of weeks since our victory, and we have still found no WMDs in Iraq: I am afraid that we will plant some of our own and say that Iraq had them. I would like to see non-American views on America's hypocricy (at least what I regard as hypocrisy).

"It was not God who created man, but man who created God." --Santa Caserio

I don't want to (re-)start a flamewar, so I'm gonna keep this short and just give you a link to a past NAO discussion. :-P
The first four posts are about the Iraq/N.Korea thing.

Clicky

When life hands you a lemon, that's 40% of your RDA of vitamin C taken care of.

Oops... I didn't mean to revisit a subject that had already been discussed (I'm new here, I didn't know)

"It was not God who created man, but man who created God." --Santa Caserio

No harm done. :-)

When life hands you a lemon, that's 40% of your RDA of vitamin C taken care of.

Wow, that other thread is a flamewar, so I am just going to post here (hope no one minds)

Falih Hassan, a key Iraqi research scientist (we though he was linked to WMDs) said recently:

As I said at my press conference and I am saying now and I say for sure, this thing belonged to the nuclear research center. This was academic work, I didn't hide anything, I didn't hide my work. We were very clear, we very transparent in our declaration. We don't have anything... We don't have anything to hide

Since he is now in US custody, and has no reason to fear Baath party repraisals, he has no reason to lie. And even if you don't like this reason, the fact that all other Iraqi research scientists we have talked to (those in our custody) have said the same thing ought to confirm this. For example, Iraq's top scientist, Nassir Hindwani has said something very similar, as has Amer Al Sa'adi (advisor to Hussein).

UN weapons inspector David Albright said:

If the U.S. believed its own story, that there were so many weapons of mass destruction, you would expect them to be completely panicked right now, because they are not protected, and they could go easily missing and get into the hands of terrorists.

However, the US has shown no sign of panic or even any attempts to recover these alleged WMDs. Also, the fact that we are desperate to find these WMDs (to legitimize our invasion), and the fact that we are not allowing UN weapons inspectors back in to aid with the search lead many (including me) to fear that we might plant some WMDs of our own and say that they were Iraqi. The longer it takes us to find these weapons, the higher the likelihood that we planted them.

Because of these statements by the Iraqis, I am led to believe that we launched this war for reasons of national gain alone (we really wanted all that oil); I never believed the crap that we were going in to "liberate" the Iraqis and let them choose their own government (which must be secular and pro-American, despite the wishes of most Iraqis), but now, more than ever, I am convinced that there really were no WMDs there to begin with, and Bush just wanted some oil.

"It was not God who created man, but man who created God." --Santa Caserio

This post was edited by Anduril on May 03, 2003.