Teribus:

... reinforced system of ongoing monitoring and verification; ...

and:

Now then Arne, where in the above text is UNMOVIC's instruction to search for proscribed weapons and materials...

I'm having no problems with the English. Are you perhaps not a native speaker?

I really am serious here, Teribus: Are you just daft, or do you really think that the job of the inspectors is to sit sipping tea at the Palestine Hotel while the Iraqis trundle the stuff in for approval? Or perhaps you're just being intellectually dishonest. Car eto explain why they needed U-2s, radiation monitors, earth-penetrating radar, helicopers and other vehicles, and a whole raft of other stuff? C'mon, fess up, you were just funning me there, right?

Arne - "Because they brought a lot of equipment and instrumentation in to do precisely that, and in fact that's what they were doing."

Well now Arne having waded through the UN text bringing UNMOVIC into existence we now all know that they were not there to search for WMD.

Ummm, maybe not. Which leave pretty much the earlier possibilities I mentioned. Clue us in, Teribus, which one is it? Daft, Dumb, or Dishonest, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis....

Now Arne IF UNMOVIC are getting IRAQ's full co-operation, they wouldn't have to search would they?

I'll play you some poker any day, Teribus. I have a royal flush. OK, now just push that money my way, and no, you can't see it. Why do you insist on repeating your stoopidity? Do you really think that Blix should have just took them at their word as longs as they were "co-operating full[y]"? I certainly don't and I doubt that Blix did either.

By Christ Arne, I do believe you are beginning to get the gist of it. Saddam and his lads tell the good Dr. Blix what they've got then the good Dr. and his team go down there to check it out.

You missed the part where Saddam didn't have the stuff. So he trots out the stuff he doesn't have and Blix doesn't destroy it. BTW, that's not too far from what happened; Saddam did say they'd destroyed a bunch of CW previously unaccounted for, but the good doctor, being a much wiser man than you, went anyway to the site in question, and they checked and indeed found residue consistent with the Iraqi claims. But that still leaves Blix to go check whereever else he wants to make sure that there's nothign squirreled away. That what's called "inspection".

Arne - "But Saddam's co-operation was hardly necessary for the success of Blix's actual mission"

Oddly enough Arne the UN Security Council unanimously decided that Saddam's co-operation was essential.

Whether "co-operation was essential" is a factual issue. Declarations (care to trot out a reference to such?) don't change facts.

"That's why WE pushed.." Who are the WE Arne? Only person I can remember pushing to get inspectors into Iraq in the summer of 2002 was George W Bush

I had no problem with putting inspectors in ... in fact I think it was a good idea. Dubya's first inclination was to invade ... and then public pressure made him go to the Security Council, and the reinstitution of inspections was deemed the best action. The entire Security COuncil agreed on this, and in fact, in March 2003, most nations thought that this was producing results, and was still the best course of action. Not so, Dubya, who needed a war for reasons best known to himself and the PNAC....

Not all intelligence was garbage - The evaluation of Iraq's missile testing and development programme was 100% correct....

And pretty much immaterial. The stated limit on missile range was 150 Km. Perhaps a couple of the Al Samoud missiles had exceeded that nominal range by a few Km (but the Iraqis claimed only with no actual warhead). But the 150 Km is a pretty arbitrary limit; those less that 150 Km were legal, but those over illegal, but there ain't a heack of a lot of difference with a few extra Km in terms of significance as "WoMD". Nonetheless, rather than give the Dubya gunslingers something to yell "Gotcha" for, the Iraqis agreed to destroy the Al Samoud missiles, and Blix was supervising this very effort when Dubya got his panties soiled and started screaming for a change.

But as to missile intelligence, it wasn't all that good, either, really. The U.S. had claimed that Saddam retained SCUDs, but the U.N. teams, checking the 'intelligence', found a load of chickens*** ... literally; at one site supposedly a secret SCUD site, they found a chicken farm. Dem's da facts, ma'am.

- About 10,000 additional liters of anthrax were not destroyed...

Actually, IIRC, it was growth media for said quantitites, and was unaccounted for, but not at all certain that it wasn't destroyed or decayed...

... and may still exist.

No. Do pay attention.

On VX Nerve Agent UNMOVIC's concludes:

Ummm, so where's the VX? Dubya been hiding it?

Aw well there you go then, must be! The newspapers Arne reads never tells lies, never shows any bias and is always completely truthful - well at least to their certain knowledge. Arne what goes into to newspapers is what the editor thinks will sell them.

I take everything I read with a grain of salt. But there's certain things that are pretty d*** certain, such as the attacks on troops, suicide bombings, slayings of high Iraqis, lack of power, water, etc., just the freaking' airport-Baghdad dash, the thousands of tonnes of explosives and weapons the U.S. allowed to be looted, the horrible and climbing toll of Iraqis dead, anonanonanonanon....

If what you state above is an example of what you read in your newspapers Arne start listening to the news. The only reference I got to your Sunni 99% figure was this - ....

Just a quick Google shows this and this.

Granted, I didn't find the explicit claims about the very high "Yes" votes in Sunni areas, but that may have been early reports; but these here indicate similar if not identical problems.

Well as we've seen all those troops really influenced the results in the Sunni areas. By and large those 140K troops, their MNF partners and the Iraq forces are actually managing to keep the vast bulk of Iraq's 25.4 million people from quick gruesome deaths, or at least they were the last time I checked. I'd say that counted as being pretty benevolent.

The number of deaths is vastly greater than under Saddam's regime. Maybe most people are not being killed, but methinks you set the bar a bit too low....

Arne asks - out of the blue - "What does that have to do with WoMDs?"


Well, this thread is about whether Dubya's invasion of Iraq was justified by the WoMD rationale he put forth, not whether a post facto nation-building excuse could be cobbled together to save his sorry ass...

To which I can only reply - ? But one thing is for certain Iraq doesn't have any WMD now, and has no plans to acquire them, that's a change for the better.

He didn't have them before. He doesn't have them now. And we have 2000+ dead U.S. soldiers and many more Iraqis. Not to mention a couple hundred billion down the drain killing people. Don't knwo where you side on that equation, but I know which side I think is the dead weight. . . .

Maybe so Arne - but having one [a constitution] gives a reasonable indication.

Balderdash. A constitution without a functioning civil government or even society is probably best used to replace the toilet paper that is impossible to find. I'd note that it was quite some time before the United States put together a constitution after the Revolutionary War ... and even then they deferred the Bill of Rights that some champions of all that is good and great in a constitution seem to think is the fundamental thing there. Not to mention, we're in the process of dismantling the Constitution here purportedly under the rationale that "being in a war changes things".... But we don't have rampant lawlessness, daily mortar attacks here, fighting in the streets on a daily basis, no jobs, no security, random slayings, food and power shortages (yet, it's still imperative that the Great Writ be suspended here, as well as our Fourth and Fifth Amendment privileges). But you think the constitution (which isn't all that great a harbinger of good things to come in Iraq even as written is a great thing? To me, it's smearing the lipstick pretty think on a pig.....

The world is in no greater danger from terrorists now than it was before.

Here I'll agree with you, strangely enough. It never was in danger from terrorists. Terrorists don't win; they use terror because it is the weapon that they do have (one Palestinian, IIRC, had said something to the effect of "sure, give us the F-16s and Cobra gunships, and we'll forgo the suicide bombings", or somethig to that effect). Their fondest hope is to make you lose your cool. But you have the power over that; you can refuse to be cowed by the terrorist and you can refuse to over-react. If you do the moral thing, they may even lose their support from the vast majority of people that think that terrorism is intrinsically wrong, and they may give up or just dissipate. Or the may not. But in either case, you've at least kept your own morals ... but that is something that it seems is less and less a consideration for Republicans and their supporters that have little left to lose in this respect.

But AAMOF, terrorist attacks are on the rise. Thought you might want to know that.

In matters relating to security or defence it is normally prudent to adopt 'Worst' case - that way you tend not to get caught out......;-)

Nonsense. But it's easy to see you don't get out much.   ;-)

And with that, I have a sweetie to go home to. Ciao.

Cheers,