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16 Responses to “Government admits oil is the reason for war in Iraq”
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Oh pl-ee-ze–another attempt by leftist media to distort the right-wing. Of course, oil is a motiivation for the Iraq War. But, had Saddam abided by IN inspections, not had a history of pursuing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, not used BW on his own people, not harbored terrorists and not game the Oil for Food program while his people suffered, we might have thought he was capable of participating in responsible government and amenable to standard diplomatic and market negotiations. Instead, he proved himself to be a pathological brutal tyrant sitting on 1/3 of the world’s untapped oil who was so consumed with himself that he was vulnerable to coup, invasion and collapse from other tyrannical leaders or terrorist envoys in the region.
And this from the same people who want us to believe that global warming is all about the environment.
hoads,
In retrospect, Saddam did ‘abide’ by the terms of conflict settlement as agreed.
UN inspectors never found nor did U.S. troops ever find even the modest amounts of WMD as detailed by Powell to the UN.
The U.S. under Reagan supplied Saddam with chemical and biological technology.
Saddam never used BW on his people. It is alleged that he used chemical weapons on Kurdish cities under Iranian control. But, it is also alleged that Iran used the chemical weapons in those Kurdish cities.
There is no evidence that Saddam harbored al-Qaeda or any other organization.
Over 3,000 companies, including U.S. corporations ‘gamed’ the U.N. Oil for Food program without penalty. Huge double standard, eh? Corporations can starve Iraqis to death and you just fricken don’t care.
“He was vulnerable to coup, invasion and collapse from other tyrannical leaders or terrorist envoys in the region.”
It’s a shame you don’t understand English.
Don’t use words beyond your comprehension.
Terrorist envoy?
There are no “invulnerable” governments or government leaders.
But, it’s very good to have you blogging again.
Simply because your existence makes the right look so ignorant and foolish.
MD
p.s. Did you even understand the video?
John,
Why not include the country’s government in your headline…”(Australia’s) Government….”?
Then you can correct the rest of the distorted title because nowhere in the video does an official say that “oil is THE reason…”.
Do you think it would be beneficial to allow terrorists to take over oil rich lands like Iraq?
Bart
I posted the video!
The video does not match the headline…that’s the point.
Do you think it would be beneficial to allow terrorists to take over oil rich lands like Iraq?
Mad Dog,
Saddam refused UN weapons inspections from 1998-2003 and played a cat and mouse game with weapons inspectors allowed during 2003 until his death.
Here’s what David Kay (head of Iraq Study Group) testified about Iraq’s WMD:
http://www.uscrusade.com/forum/config.pl/noframes/read/1402
Iraq’s WMD programs spanned more than two decades, involved thousands of people, billions of dollars, and were elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The very scale of this program when coupled with the conditions in Iraq that have prevailed since the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom dictate the speed at which we can move to a comprehensive understanding of Iraq’s WMD activities.
We need to recall that in the 1991-2003 period the intelligence community and the U.N./IAEA inspectors had to draw conclusions as to the status of Iraq’s WMD program in the face of incomplete, and often false, data supplied by Iraq or data collected either by U.N./IAEA inspectors operating within the severe constraints that Iraqi security and deception actions imposed or by national intelligence collection systems with their own inherent limitations. The result was that our understanding of the status of Iraq’s WMD program was always bounded by large uncertainties and had to be heavily caveated.
Why are we having such difficulty in finding weapons or in reaching a confident conclusion that they do not exist or that they once existed but have been removed? Our search efforts are being hindered by six principal factors:
1. From birth all of Iraq’s WMD activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program.
2. Deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans- to post-conflict.
3. Post-OIF looting destroyed or dispersed important and easily collectable material and forensic evidence concerning Iraq’s WMD program. As the report covers in detail, significant elements of this looting were carried out in a systematic and deliberate manner, with the clear aim of concealing pre-OIF activities of Saddam’s regime.
4. Some WMD personnel crossed borders in the pre/trans-conflict period and may have taken evidence and even weapons-related materials with them.
5. Any actual WMD weapons or material is likely to be small in relation to the total conventional armaments footprint and difficult to near impossible to identify with normal search procedures. It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two-car garage.
6. The environment in Iraq remains far from permissive for our activities, with many Iraqis that we talk to reporting threats and overt acts of intimidation and our own personnel being the subject of threats and attacks. In September alone we have had three attacks on ISG facilities or teams: The ISG base in Irbil was bombed and four staff injured, two very seriously; a two-person team had their vehicle blocked by gunmen and only escaped by firing back through their own windshield; and on Wednesday, 24 September, the ISG Headquarters in Baghdad again was subject to mortar attack.
What have we found and what have we not found in the first three months of our work?
We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the U.N.
Examples of concealment
Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:
– A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to U.N. monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW (chemical biological weapons) research.
– A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW (bioweapons) agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N.
– Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.
– New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the U.N.
– Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists’ homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation.
– A line of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.
– Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N.
– Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 km – well beyond the 150-km range limit imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.
– Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-km range ballistic missiles – probably the No Dong – 300-km range anti-ship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment.
In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence – hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use – are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts.
Here’s what Rolf Ekeus (Executive Chairman of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq from 1991 to 1997) had to say about Iraq’s WMD:
http://www.usembassy.it/file2003_07/alia/A3070202.htm
Regarding biological weapons, the U.N. inspection team, UNSCOM, managed after four years of investigation to confirm the existence in Iraq of a major secret biological weapons program. This led in August 1995 to the defection from Iraq of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamal, director of Iraq’s WMD programs. During UNSCOM’s debriefings in Iraq after the defection, Iraqi biological weapons scientists, able to speak slightly more openly than normally, explained that their secret work mainly was on assignments to find means for warfare against the Iranians.
Regarding the nuclear weapons projects, the Iraqi authorities defended their systematic violation of Iraq’s obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with the proposition that Iran, likewise a party to the treaty, was active in developing its own nuclear weapons. Iraq’s obsession with Iran was illustrated by its air attack in 1983 on the Iranian nuclear reactors at Busher.
Thus the Iraqi policy after the Gulf War was to halt all production of warfare agents and to focus on design and engineering, with the purpose of activating production and shipping of warfare agents and munitions directly to the battlefield in the event of war. Many hundreds of chemical engineers and production and process engineers worked to develop nerve agents, especially VX, with the primary task being to stabilize the warfare agents in order to optimize a lasting lethal property. Such work could be blended into ordinary civilian production facilities and activities, e.g., for agricultural purposes, where batches of nerve agents could be produced during short interruptions of the production of ordinary chemicals.
This combination of researchers, engineers, know-how, precursors, batch production techniques and testing is what constituted Iraq’s chemical threat — its chemical weapon. The rather bizarre political focus on the search for rusting drums and pieces of munitions containing low-quality chemicals has tended to distort the important question of WMD in Iraq and exposed the American and British administrations to unjustified criticism.
It is understandable that the U.N. inspectors and even more, the military search teams, have had difficulty penetrating the sophisticated, well-rehearsed and protected WMD program in Iraq. The task was made infinitely more challenging by the fact that Iraq was, and indeed still is, a “republic of fear.” Through my indirect contact with some senior Iraqi weapons scientists, I have been given to understand that the reign of terror is still in place.
Outsiders who have not dealt with Iraq cannot easily understand the extent to which the terror of the Hussein years has penetrated that unhappy nation. As long as Hussein and his sons are not apprehended or proven dead, few if any of those involved in the weapons program will provide information on their activities. The risk of terrible revenge against oneself or one’s family is simply too great. The first point on a WMD agenda must be to create a safe environment free from the remnants of terror.
Here’s what the 9/11 Commission Report had to say about links between Iraq and Al Queda:
http://www.qando.net/archives/003626.htm
Here’s John Loftus ( president of The Intelligence Summit) describing the WMD evidence that has been suppressed, distorted and ignored:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=F715A709-2614-4EA5-967C-F6151F94A364
What –you found some obscure reference to some obscure US tie to OFF scandal? Saddam spearheaded the OFF scandal for his own profit while terrorizing his people–he was the lynchpin.
And get over your high horse. “Envoy” is as good a choice of word as any to describe the tactics of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas to establish their footholds in governments by bribing the people with handouts and social services in their quest to takeover governments.
And about my misuse of BW instead of CW–it was past by bedtime when I wrote that.
Thanks for the clarification in number 7.
It’s the only post responsive to mine.
Hoads
Don’t confuse Big Bird with facts.
Bart – John is so partisan, I don’t think he even realizes he does this. Clearly, the title doesn’t match the video.
John – Don’t you think a little mea culpa is in order here?
Terrorists don’t have ambassadors or envoys.
Unless you want to give ‘terrorists’ governmental status?
Which would make ‘terrorists’ into soldiers.
Remove the enemy combatant status of all detainees in Gitmo and make them into POWs subject to all laws.
The title is at least as representative of titles used by Faux Spews aka Fox News.
What –you found some obscure reference to some obscure US tie to OFF scandal?
If you want to call the UN report on the scandal obscure, sure! That would fit in with your English as a second language skill.
Mac
You are right I am against nation building and being the policemen of the world and you are for it!
Mad Dog,
“Thanks for the clarification in number 7.
It’s the only post responsive to mine.”
I didn’t expect any thing more from you.
“If you want to call the UN report on the scandal obscure, sure! That would fit in with your English as a second language skill.”
You mean the same UN whose members were the co-conspirators and embezzelers in the OFF scandal? I don’t call that obscure–I call that laughable.
Oh?
The UN got money from the scandal?
How much? Was it in dollars or euros?
Oh, you mean UN members like Australia. Who got millions through the Australian Wheat Board aka AWB Ltd.
If you don’t know anything about the scandal, why not read the independent report by Paul Volcker. He’s an ‘American.’
Of interest, the convictions were of an American oil man from Texas, wasn’t it?
And the crime wasn’t embezzlement, either.
Nice abuse of language.