Jeff O'Bryant
The treaty actually achieves only one real result: to make the United States appear weak.
Inspections do not work. Whether you think Bush lied or was duped into believing Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (as with Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi and a host of other politicians who are also on record as holding the same belief) or not, clearly the inspections process failed us. With Russia, a country almost 40 times larger than Iraq, what hope do we have of making inspections work there? Of course, if you could completely trust the Russians to tell us where they store and make all of their nuclear weapons, it would be no problem. But if we could completely trust them, there would be no need for a treaty in the first place.
While START allows for satellite and remote monitoring, it includes provisions for a paltry 18 on-site inspections per year. At only 18 inspections, that leaves an awful lot of those 6 million-plus square miles open for Russia to do anything it wants.
Further, while it is conceivable that nuclear weapons held by the Russians either have fallen or may fall into hands of terrorists, START will do nothing workable to actually change that. It also will not deter any other powers who seek nuclear bombs from continuing their quest for the ultimate weapon. If one thinks Ahmadinejad will curb his ambitions for such power because the United States cuts the number of their nuclear stockpile, then one is, simply and totally, oblivious to reality. But if one thinks Kim Jong-il is more likely to be aggressive in the face of a self-weakened United States, then move to the head of the class.
If the logic of START worked, our police forces should disarm themselves, but what you’d see, rather than a reduction in crime, would be a reduction in the number of policemen who survived encounters with criminals. If the logic of START worked, the IRS should forsake any use of coercive force to collect taxes as, in the absence of such force, Americans would obviously and willingly send in all that the government demanded of them. If the logic of START worked, parents and teachers would no longer have to use the threat of punishment on children because, in the absence of such a threat, children would obviously and spontaneously start acting like adults. If the logic of START worked, Americas could just stop voting as, with the absence of the threat of becoming unemployed, politicians could be trusted to always act in our best interests.
But at this point you may be thinking this is different, that we’re talking about the potential extinction of virtually all life on earth, right? That this is a special case and the normal rules of logic must not apply here? On the contrary, because we are talking about such a dangerous weapon with such serious consequences, logic must apply. It is a sad, but unfortunately an obvious, truth that enlightenment, a commitment to peace and dedication to non-violent means of resolving disputes only works when the other side believes as you do. Playing a game of, say, basketball without cheating while the other side observes no such limitation may result in your losing nothing but the game itself. Your team can at least walk away with your honor and dignity intact. But behaving the same way where weapons that can lay waste to entire cities and kill millions of people are concerned isn’t honorable or dignified; it is suicidal. No, it is worse: it is genocidal.
Some buffoonish politicians claim that the passage of START is a success for the administration and for Democrats in Congress. But weakening the country by reducing the number of weapons themselves, by making America appear weak and by making the decision to willingly soften our own might in the face of an ever more dangerous world is anything but a success. It is a mistake, a New Year’s resolution by our government that will come back to haunt the country in years to come.
Jeff O’Bryant is the author of “Up into the Hills – A Brief History of Catoosa County” and holds two degrees: a bachelor’s in education and a bachelor’s with honors in history. He can be contacted at jeffobryant@catt.com.
I've already dealt with that well-traveled talking-point; if you'd bothered to read what I'd written before replying to it, you would look much less foolish now. And even if you didn't like what I wrote, the fact still remains that none of those people launched a murderous invasion of Iraq.
"Bottom line- we went to war in Iraq. Ultimately, Iraq will be better off for getting rid of that monster. Period."
Even if that was the case (and with a murderous but secular dictatorship being replaced by an explicitly Islamist state, that, unfortunately, remains to be seen), you're merely offering an ends-justify-any-means argument. That's extremely questionable on its face, but calls for particularly harsh scrutiny when used, as you're using it, to try to sweep aside concerns born of responsible citizenship.
"Not only classicliberal2's ravings ignore why Obama has not just pulled us out since Iraq was, in his mind, such a horrible mistake but it also ignores the larger issues brought up by this article, the START treaty, which is actually bad, in favor of more liberal tangents designed to bring into question Conservative thought."
Funny, I don't remember ever even suggesting I was offering a comprehensive critique of either the column or of Obama's Iraq policy. Without that, I'm afraid you have no more point, here, than you did when you were parroting the talking-points about congressional liberals (rather than, say, thinking for yourself).
Not only classicliberal2's ravings ignore why Obama has not just pulled us out since Iraq was, in his mind, such a horrible mistake but it also ignores the larger issues brought up by this article, the START treaty, which is actually bad, in favor of more liberal tangents designed to bring into question Conservative thought.
Not surprising a liberal can't stay on the subject at hand. Why do that when you can just bash Bush?
A perfect example of why what is called "conservatism" today is such a damnable thing--it presents reality as whatever the speaker wants it to be, without reference to any real-world facts, and maintains the fantasy, even when it directly contradicts all of those facts. You aren't offering an "interpretation," there; you're just offering a lie. A blatant, ugly, unforgivable lie.
In the real world, the inspections in Iraq worked. Iraq was disarmed. This isn't a matter subject to ANY controversy--even Bush's handpicked weapons inspectors concluded that this had been the case. When Bush and his underlings, with neocon fever-dreams of world domination clouding their brains, started banging the drums for war with Iraq, Iraq had been disarmed of its WMD capabilities for more than a decade.
This was pretty obvious well before the war. Years earlier, Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, had defected from Iraq. He'd ran Iraq's military-industrial ministry for years. He was the fellow who revealed the existence of Iraq's previously-undeclared biological efforts, and became a source frequently cited by war-hawks in the administration in the lead-up to war, including Colin Powell and Bush himself. What these same hawks ALWAYS managed to leave on the cutting room floor, when referencing him, though, was the fact that he said Iraq had destroyed its WMD programs in the early 1990s. The order for this destruction came from Saddam Hussein himself, and Hussein Kamel said he, as the military-industrial minister responsible, carried it out.
Former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter had written about this long before the war, and, contradicted by officialdom, was entirely ignored. On the eve of war, though, a diligent Cambridge researcher got his hands on the minutes of Hussein Kamel's debriefing, which confirmed what Ritter had been saying, that Kamel had admitted Iraq had destroyed its weapons years ago.
Those involved in monitoring Iraq had definitively confirmed Iraq had engaged in widespread destruction of its programs, and believed Iraq to be disarmed. Rolf Ekeus was the executive chairman of UNSCOM for six of the seven years it operated in Iraq. In an appearance at Harvard on May 23, 2000, he said, about Iraq's WMD programs, "we [UNSCOM] felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq's capabilities fundamentally." Ritter was UNSCOM's chief weapons inspector in Iraq for nearly the whole of its operations, there. He agreed with this assessment:
"...what I and others [in UNSCOM] did... we had stated that the weapons inspectors achieved a 90 to 95 percent level of accounting for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. What this means, is that the major factories that produced weapons of mass destruction were identified and destroyed. And the production equipment associated with the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction were identified and destroyed. That the vast majority of the weapons produced by these factories were identified and destroyed. There is a certain amount, 5 to 10 percent, that is unaccounted for. But we have no evidence that Iraq has retained this material. We just can't account for it. And that because of this we feel, that Iraq was fundamentally disarmed. This means that Iraq is no longer capable of producing biological or chemical weapons, or nuclear weapons or long range ballistic missiles." (Ritter, interview with Chronogram, April 2002)
Summing up the work of UNSCOM in an interview in the Spring 2004 issue of "New Perspectives," Ekeus echoed this:
"By 1998, UNSCOM had discovered and destroyed 95 percent of Saddam's programs for mass destruction weapons. The remaining 5 percent involved the chemical precursors and growth medium that couldn't be accounted for. But as we said at the time, it made very little sense to make weapons stockpiles out of this and store them because they would deteriorate rapidly unless used."
The pre-war conclusion of the International Atomic Energy Agency, charged with monitoring Iraq's nuclear capability:
"Based on all credible information available to date,... the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material."
IAEA director Muhammed ElBaradei told the UN in January 2003--again, pre-war--that "We have found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons programme since the elimination of the programme in the 1990s," and that inspectors "should be able within the next few months to provide credible assurance that Iraq has no nuclear weapons program".
Hans Blix and his UNMOVIC team had proven the administration was outright lying about Iraq months before the U.S. invasion occurred. As we've learned in recent years (and as those of us who follow such things had suspected from almost the beginning), the administration had only demanded the reintroduction of UNMOVIC because it was assumed Saddam would refuse, and that refusal would provide a legalistic pretext for war (very important for the British). With this expectation, Bush and his underlings had made all sorts of outlandish allegations in public about alleged Iraqi weapons sites, in the belief that no one would be ever be able to check out those claims until after they'd gotten their war. When Saddam instead called the bluff and allowed the inspectors to return, the inspectors set about systematically disproving those outlandish allegations. Site after site, there was nothing in Iraq resembling what Bush and his underlings had been describing for months--no prohibited activity or sign that there had been much of ANY activity at any of the "sites of concern." The administration sent the inspectors on one wild-goose-chase after another--one inspector described the Bush information they were getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage." The administration's response--sort of like the garbage you wrote above--was to use this as evidence of the ineffectiveness of the inspection regime. The corporate press, with few exceptions, did its level best to sit on this information in the lead-up to war (the L.A. Times and Associated Press were virtually alone in reporting it), but to those who paid any attention, it was very clear, from January 2003 forward, that the most tangible part of the Bush case for war--its claims about weapons sites--was an utter hoax.
After the war, it was established, beyond any doubt, that these pre-war assessments were correct. The Iraq Survey Group was handpicked by Bush, made up of hardcore Bush partisans, and it spins like crazy in its final report in an effort to soften the blow, but the conclusions, stripped of that spin, are incontrovertible: Iraq went out of the WMD business in the early 1990s. They destroyed everything, had no WMDs or programs for years before the Bush invasion, and had no plans to renew any of the programs in the forseeable future. The details, in one of a series of message-board posts I assembled:
http://claslib2.tripod.com/lh/ip10.html
It's extraordinarily offensive that, at this late date, with so many thousands murdered by Bush's lies, you would pretend as if what he said about Iraq was a matter of "belief." In the real world, the one outside Fox News, Bush and his underlings made dozens of assertions regarding Iraq's WMD capabilities (and fantasy tag-team with al Qaida), and there was absolutely no real foundation for any of them.
For literally months, Bush and his thugs hammered on the intel agencies to come up with something, anything, that supported Bush's public assertions about Iraq. They reimported into the process phony "defectors" supplied by an international felon (who was also, it turned out, an agent of Iranian intelligence). They told the story Bush wanted people to hear. The only problem was that nothing any of them had ever said had any relationship to reality, and by the time Bush came to power, the UN and every major intel agency in the world had cut them off (they'd ripped off the State Department for millions in the '90s, money that, in all likelihood, went right into the Swiss bank accounts of their leader and his cronies). The inability of the intel community to come up with much of anything to support the public assertions of Bush and co. eventually led to the establishment of a new group in the Pentagon, whose job was to sift through raw intel reports and pick out data-points that supported Bush's assertions, leaving on the cutting-room floor any consideration of the reliability of the data.
None of this--or anything else the administration did--can be reconciled with a good-faith effort to get at the truth. Over time, I assembled a series of message-board posts on Iraq (that earlier one I referenced being the last in the line). They're mostly devoted to covering the administration's handling of intel in the lead-up to war. Rather than linking to each individually, here's an old blog post that links to all of them:
http://lefthooktheblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/courage-consequence-and-iraq-papers.html
The congressional Democrats are a damnable lot in the whole mess, as well, but their sin, in repeating some of Bush's lies, was in taking the word of the "President," and being craven cowards in the aftermath of 9/11. Congress doesn't have an intel agency. Intelligence is an executive function, and those in congress are entirely dependent upon the executive for their information, an executive who was lying to them and to the country at every turn, and it's disgraceful that you would put their expressed views on the matter as being on par with Bush's--some sort of "belief" held without reference to facts, but on which was based a murderous invasion of another country (no different from Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and with even less provocation). Bush knew exactly what he was doing, and if he didn't, a single phone call would have made it clear. It doesn't really matter, in terms of the final result, if his malady was criminal incompetence, outright evil, or a mixture of the two.
It wasn't the inspections that failed us, when it came to Iraq.