I’ve been saying this for years because a close friend of mine has been affected by them. He was a marine in ODS and got dosed during a scud attack that “missed” his regiment.
But hey, it’s the Internetz, where everybody knows better than the other guy. Now where’s Bismarck with a tirade about geopolitical complexity…
Gulf war syndrome? I can’t help but be amused by the shit thrown in my direction for having a modicum of intellectual rigor in discussions of international affairs. It’s akin to me giving you a hard time for being assertive during discussions of the pros and cons of a MIG welder.
Man, your intellectual rigor is admirable, but that wasn’t throwing shit your way. I was just baiting you.
Throwing shit would have been calling you a misanthropic liberal egghead trust fund baby. None of which is likely to be true.
From the article, “The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an ACTIVE weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of LONG-ABANDONED programs, built in CLOSE COLLABORATION with the West.” (Capitalization added for emphasis)
This is old hat and hardly justifies the costs of the war.
"After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims. [Which sentence, if you’ve done even a tiny fraction of the required reading on OIF, you’ve encountered, in some variation or another, at least a few hundred times].
Then, during the long occupation, American troops began encountering old chemical munitions in hidden caches and roadside bombs. Typically 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets, they were remnants of an arms program Iraq had rushed into production in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.
All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.
In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find."
http://m.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61503/paul-r-pillar/intelligence-policyand-the-war-in-iraq
Former chief of analysis at the Centeal Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) and National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.
Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community’s former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community’s expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.
Bush 43 circa 2008, “the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein.”
If that was the case, then why has it taken this long from these guys stories to come out? Why were they told to alter their reports?
And at least some of this happened on Obama’s watch.
Let the slippery slope begin!
http://www.abc10.com/news/nation/man-in-seattle-womens-locker-room-cites-gender-rule/45435945
“I’m a Tom-boy girl trapped in a man’s body. Who are you to tell me, a she, that I have to wear skirts like a ‘proper woman.’”
That guy deserves a free beer, like, every single day, forever.
It is the case, categorically. The president who ordered the invasion has said so himself verbatim.
Again, the ultimate metric of a just war is prudence. Iraq was contained after the Gulf War. It’s military forces were devastated, and its CBRN infrastructure was uprooted by post-war weapon inspectors. It’s economy was in tatters, largely in part to UNSC sanctions. There’s was an argument that containment should be retooled early in the 21st century. There was no prudentq argument for war.
You keep hanging on to that bone that our beloved gov. tells the truth about everything.
Good luck with that.
I never claimed it did. If there was evidence that Iraq had the active CBRN programs it had been reputed to by the Bush administration, it’s safe to say that the administration would have loudly and frequently spoke of the finding. It didn’t. In fact, in a courageous act, Bush went as far as to say the entire war was a mistake and was based on false assumptions.
Already did above, Push-Pop.
“the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein.”
Acknowledged Intelligence failure. No purported “WMD”. The primary casus belli was shown to false. Bush 43 expresses deep regret over this fact. Pretty clear cut to those who aren’t wholly invested in the debacle that was Iraq war.