Pardon for not having read those links you provided, Lost. I have to admit, when I saw the Fox News link among those, I got a bit skeptical.

In acknowledgment that new information is always emerging, I'll revisit those links you provided. Thanks for taking the time to further explain your stand.

-- Nephele

Thanks, Nephele. Regarding the FOX article, it had an overview of sorts which is why I included it, but I am very skeptical of John Lofton, who FOX has covered extensively on the subject, so I don't use any of Lofton's material unless it's cited by other people. I have a friend who works for an intelligence journal who is enthusiastic about Lofton, but I don't fully trust Lofton. I think Sada is useful to read because of who he was, but I have not seen the airlift angle collaborated by other people, either. I think Shaw is reliable, because he lost his job and really got nothing out of going public. David Kay had openly said that were no large WMD dumps left in Iraq, when the administration was saying they were there, so I think that when Kay said he had information on transfers, he probably did.

(Like Kay, I do not believe there were ever vast quantities of WMD's, and what was there were chemical and perhaps biological. The best estimate I have heard is that: half of them were destroyed after 1991, a quarter went to Syria, and the rest were the inactive, degraded ones found.)

I think the Ukrainian intelligence reports are the most significant, especially on the meeting in Baku, which is virtually their home turf, and the British journalists inside Syria are a close second. I have the highest respect for military historian John Keegan, who I have been reading since I was about 12!

Bodansky is no apologist for Bush, even though he served on the Congressional task force on terrorism. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice actually tried to insist that Bodansky include nothing in his book outside Iraq. I don't take much stock in his predictions for the future, but being Israeli he does have contacts in hostile nations all over the Middle East, and I think he's basically reliable.

I found links to a trove of documents on the CIA website on the subject that were posted a couple of years ago, but now they have all been encrypted, which is very frustrating.

I think that the closest analogies to this topic are A) when the US did not publicly acknowledge that Russian and Chinese troops were in Vietnam (with at least one East German unit in Laos) out of fear of widening the war, and B) when Russian pilots flew against the Israelis in 1973, but were ignored for the same reason. Then, a few people said it, but they were minimized, and years later it turned out to be true.

There are two very interesting questions I have about all this:

1) What if the US did actually know that weapons had been moved, before the invasion?

2) What has been done about the weapons since then? Especially in light of the current turmoil in Syria?

It is also interesting that many people in 2003 were wondering why "supporting terrorism" was such a hot issue with Iraq, when Syria had been doing it for decades and we didn't do much. Then, people start talking about weapons being moved to where else, but Syria.

All in all, I think that WMD's were used to whip up public support for the invasion if Iraq, but they were really peripheral to the decision to invade. I am most interested in where are they now, and who knew.

What's truth? As a sociologist I've learned truth is what is assumed to be true. American government and secret services often lied, especially about wars. (It's not better in Europe or Germany.) What is with the Tonkin incidence, which led to Vietnam war? The Vietcong was blamed to have open fire on two American warships in 1964.



Wikipedia: Tomkin Incident

The truth came out, through the American Sociologist Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, who was working for the CIA and sent a secret report first to the New York times and then to dozends of newspapers.

Wikipedia: Pentagon Papers
In 2003 there were not enough WMDs to reason a war with Iraq, of course the russians put them to Syria. I mean, I don't believe in CIA and NSA etc. reports which evidentially often were wrong or wrongly reported by government. So I repeat Wikipedia:



In difference to the reports you've mentioned there is something like a public control of wikipedia's construction of truth, which is similar to the science system. It's not perfect, but I'm sure that different people with a high credibility and a better reputation than former representatives of the Hussein dictatorship in Iraq or russian generals are involved. And no one else could have information like that unless no material proves were found, because military affairs were top secret there.

Truth in policy is a strategical weapon. Political communication is spoken or writen in order to gain power not truth.

I regret, that I didn't read your citated sources at once, but after reading this thread again I have nothing to correct.

I think a better explanation why Bush didn't used this CIA reports 2004-2006 as you told us, is, that he didn't believe his own secret services any more, or he was sure no one would believe him if he would argue like that.

I mean, policy is a dirty job, but someone got to do it.

I've yet to see anyone actually spell out what would have been "enough" wmds to reason a war with iraq.

Are we to really believe that the majority of the people against the war would have changed their tune if we had found a pile of weapons? After all it was a pre-emptive attack on a country that had yet to actually harm us.

I agree completely. At that level, information is never issued for the sake of "truth", but to support an agenda. Sometimes we will see varying degrees of "truth", but seldom the entire story.
And regarding your second point above, that would sort of explain why the administration freaked out over Shaw's revelations. Shaw thought he was doing Bush a favor after the bashing Bush was taking over WMD's, but was too naive to realize that this would not be considered a "favor" at all, because no one wanted the issue revisited fr any reason. Best just to forget it all, and turn everyone's attention to "nation building". (I have my own opinions on this concept, which I'll spare everyone!)
Sort of like a divorce, once it's done it's over, no matter what you find.

A pre-emptive attack means, that the enemy would start a war real soon, so it is a strategical advantage to start with war and surprise him. There is a moral difference. The war would have happened anyway. This can't be said about the Iraq War 2003. I defended the american position in Germany with arguments like this: between 50 000 and 100 000 people died in this war. Saddam Hussein killed 400 000 people in the first year of his dictatorship. Over a longer period this war will save much more lives than it killed. So the moral aspect is ambiguous.

Well it probably will become a less bloody oligarchy. That's progress at least.

Shouldn't every nation have the right to defend itself? Israel isn't run by a basket full of kittens, so I think putting all the heat on Iran is unreasonable, what they're doing in Palestine is atrocious. Theyre pushing people out of their homes and dropping white phosphorus bombs that are landing in densely populated civilian areas. Sure Ahmadinejad is a nut; he's an Islamic fundamentalist with possible ties to terrorism, combine that with a Zionist state a couple miles away and the situations bound to explode. Israel has nukes too (estimated 100-400 warheads as a matter of fact, and their military is ranked 10 in the world), and they have the US, if Iran were to nuke Israel, they would be vaporized before they could pull their finger off the button, whereas Israel could badger them like theyve been doing for the past couple decades and easily get away with it. But don't be mistaken, I don't agree with Iran OR Israel having nukes, both regimes are run by religious extremists that unanimously despise each other, they're too dangerous to be given something that powerful.

I'm not really all that much of a fan of the USA having nukes either TBH.

I really don't know, at the moment mossad agents from Israel tarn themselves as CIA Agents and hire murderers to kill Iranian nuclear specialists. I wonder what would have happened if the UDSSR would have done the same with American nuclear scientists. Israel got several modern submarines from Germany (more or less for free). They can fire cruise missles with nukes from this submarines, so they can strike back anyway, but Israel is a small country, one or two a-bombs and it's done. So they won't wait for Iran to start with nuking.

The problem is, if Iran blocks the Street of Hormuz, where 20% of the worldwide oil transports have to pass, the oil prices will increase about 100%. This would probably cause a worldwide economic crash, especially because the public debt crisis in Europe is an additional risc. So we might have a complete economic crash aund the first nuclear war of the world right soon.

Nukes are the most useless things in the world, rational leaders have no use for them and they always find a way of falling into the wrong hands. We can't get rid of them now either, there's always going to be some crackpot with one buried in their backyard.

Today AP is running a story that Iran is going to shut off oil exports to countries they deem hostile. They have started by cutting off Britain and France [because of their support in Iran's sanctions], but we do not yet know what other countries will eventually be blacklisted.

Spain, Greece, and Italy all depend heavily on Iranian oil imports for their oil supplies. While Iran has not said they intend to stop shipment to these countries specifically I have to wonder if that is the long term plan here; since doing so would help push them off the edge into economic oblivion, taking the eurozone down with them. Iran is surely smart enough to know they cannot win a shooting war, but they know from their own history how they can use their oil exports to control the economies of other nations [like the US in the 1970s]. If they could cause the euro to crash, it would take down Britain, France, Germany and the United States with them economically-speaking. The US is involved insofar as we are allowing the FDIC to "back" the debts held by some European banks which would be severely hit by a euro crash.

I think the reason why the US does not want Israel to go in militarily is because of the effects it may have on oil & gas prices at atime when our economy is still struggling to recover from the depression. If Iran took itself out of the world's oil trade intentionally and stopped all their oil exports there would no longer be any reason for the US to care if Israel goes in: and they would probably get the green light [unofficially of course] for a plethora of reasons [revenge for trying to destroy the world's economy, to prevent them from getting the bomb, etc].

OTOH Iran needs the money from their oil exports, and can easily reroute anything that would have gone to their so-called "hostile" countries to countries they consider neutral or friendly; such as the Chinese. This would not really impact the demand or supply of oil internationally since you've basically got the same cards but have shuffled them up so they appear in different places. The only way Iran is going to make an impact on supply & demand is if they take themselves offline to decrease the market's supply. Nonetheless I expect shipment shuffling to cause oil & gas prices to jack up real fast when trading opens up on Monday "just because" it gives speculators a good excuse for price gouging. We'll quite possibly be seeing $4 gas by the end of tomorrow [that's "only" a thirty cent increase].

The only way we're going to keep the Iran issue from hurting our economy while nothing "actually happens" is if we take gas off the commodities market, which is something the Obama Admin simply won't do because [as they have said 3-4 years ago] they want sky high gas prices to push people into alternative fuels & public transit. Obama has said on the record that he wants US citizens paying as much in gas as the people of Europe, he just wants the change to be gradual so it doesn't shock the economy. $8/gal gas wouldn't be so bad; if the American people had the same salaries & benefits of European workers. But to have those types of prices at a time when the jobs that have replaced the ones that the recession killed are min wage service sector, would be extremely bad for most American families. It would be even worse if it coincides with the Republican dream of abolishing the min wage & child labor laws.

In fact the oil prices are rising, at the moment they are higher in europe than in america, because there is no way for transporting it from america to europe. But I don't think this becomes a serious problem here. The problem is that all this threatening with war unites the Iranians. Even the opposition of the gouvernment cpmpares the situation with Iraq before the second Iraq war. There is no solution. No one knows exactly wheather they build the a-bomb or not. So if Israel wants to destroy their nuclear plants they should do it soon, because the actual situation costs a lot of money. As far as I'm informed they might not have the military power for an operation like that. They would need 120 jets and some bombs they probaly not own. Many of the Iranian nuclear plants are deep under the earth. Even america could not reach them with an air-strike. Israel's Jets would have to violate the Iraqian airspace and there is an Russian aircraft carrier near by in a Syrian harbor. It would be a risc and I don't think Israel will start a war without america.

Do you think the Russians would respond?

If this Iran thing goes hot, it will benefit them financially since it would rise the "value" per barrel of oil [the Russians are big producers of oil]. This probably was not unnoticed when the Russians started to help Iran's nuclear program to begin with.

Iran and Syria are the last allies of Russia in the middle east. Russia just sold modern surface to air missiles to Iran, so that they can defend their airspace. Only Syria orders 12% of russian military exports. The military industrie is one of the last high tech sectors they have. Putin announced new investments in military equipment about 560 billion euros until 2020. That are 560 x 1,3 dollars. They will build 400 new intercontinental rockets to stay able to nuke the USA although there will be a new anti missile shield, which should protect europe from missiles from the middle east, but is able to stop russian missiles too. We are going into a new period of cold war and it's not Russia who got to take the blame, but primarily America and the Nato. Russia draw back it's troups from eastern europe, and gave the countries free. It received nothing in exchange. The Nato did nothing to consider the Russian inerests but tried to expand the Nato Forces against Russia. That's the point of view of a european whose country is a member of the Nato. There is no other way, than to integrate Russia into the Nato before, to avoid a Russian-Chinese alliance with lots of sympathy in the rest of the world. Why shouldn't they defend their allied Iran against an agressive action from Israel, which would be a violation of the international law?

A breaking news from the New York Times. The U.S. Agencies don't expect Iran to build the A-Bomb.



New York Times

I think it's time for diplomacy instead of air-strikes which could lead to a war. The prices for oil would explode and we would probably have a new cold war with Russia and China.