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C. As at 1991 it was fairly well documented that Saddam held WMDs (chemical weapons). No one has ever refuted or denied their existence at that time.
If by WMDs you mean WWI era weapons such as mustard gas, sure.
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D. It is reasonable commonsense that such chemical weapons do not vanish without some papertrail - after all you don't just bury them in a backyard. Nonetheless despite enormous amounts of money neither papertrail for their disposal nor WMDs have been sighted.
You mean like having two gigantic incinerators where tons of WWI era WMDs were vaporized? Would that qualify?
Here's the report from when we started burning them...in 1992.
http://www.iraqwatch...687/s-24984.htm
Here it's going along swimmingly in 1996:
http://www.fas.org/n...s/s1996-848.htm
"The destruction of the chemical weapons stocks benefited from steady and good cooperative support by the Iraqi authorities and the personnel involved."
Even in the Washington Post's near-propaganda from 2002 points out:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer
"Iraq eventually acknowledged making three types of biological weapons using anthrax bacteria and two kinds of biological toxins: botulinum toxin and aflatoxin. But Iraq is also known to have conducted extensive research on at least three other pathogens that attack humans or crops, and it dabbled with a half-dozen others, U.N. inspection reports show.
In its final three years in Iraq, the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, destroyed all of Iraq's known biological munitions, and much of the equipment needed to make new ones. But the inspectors didn't get it all.
"UNSCOM didn't destroy everything," said Richard Spertzel, a retired biological warfare expert who oversaw the dismantling of Iraq's bioweapons program. "Iraq still has enough equipment, material, people and know-how to make biological weapons.""
I'm sure there were some WMDs somewhere...for one thing, it's obvious that Saddam didn't know where all of his own stockpiles of mustard gas were. For another, there was lots of it 'yellow tagged' to be destroyed, and UNSCOM just hadn't had a chance to burn it yet. But in spite of what you and some others claim, most of the WMDs had been destroyed, and we knew they had been destroyed.
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E. Per se, disposing of Saddam was doing the world a favour.
I always love lines like this. It doesn't mean anything, but boy does it sound cool.
Out of curiousity, would 'disposing' of the United States be doing 'the world' a favor? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Further it was not as if the "Iraquis" even had the relatively civilizing influence of being on the edge of Europe.
Yep, those poor "Iraquis", being so far from the "civilizing" influences of Europe.
At least now it becomes clear what "world" we'd be doing a favor by "disposing" of Saddam.
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I. The only 2 modern examples of nations conquered and then rehabilitated, of which I am aware, to the West are Japan and Germany both of which had relatively homogeneous populations and history/tradition as a unified country
Right, because Germany had such a long tradition of being a unified country...
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K. At the time I said that I did not think that the USA had the intestinal fortitude for the longhaul task (regardless of whether the task was worthy of the cost: human and economic). That almost lone voice of prescience is proving prophetic unfortunately.
Good thing your almost lone voice was heard in 1991, when you were able to convince Bush I. So what method did you use to convince yourself that the general consensus was an almost lone voice?
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Oh yes I realise that electronic groupies don't believe in spelling but the English word is "indigenous" from the Latin indigenus.....
Congratulations on your English. You might, however, want to bone up on your History.