Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread But that would bolster Rudy's claims of blaming it on the troops
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread You think Bush is a bad CEO? Look at his business record. He was given about 5 different companies and ran them all into the ground. He was gifted Harvard and Yale and did nothing with it. He, as President, is unfortunately doing what he has always done: screw up. He is a terrible CEO. He is a terrible statesman. He just can't get it right, but ya know he is 50 something. He has never gotten it right. There was never a reason to suspect he might be a decent President.
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2004/10/29/news/explode.html "A French journalist who visited the Qaqaa munitions depot south of Baghdad in November last year said she witnessed Islamic insurgents looting vast supplies of explosives more than six months after the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime. The account of Sara Daniel, which will be published Wednesday in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, lends further weight to allegations that American occupying forces in Iraq failed to protect hundreds of tons of munitions from extremists plotting attacks against their own troops."
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread Straight up. And yet the sheep gave him the Rep primary before we even got to vote in California. That was the day my contempt for the ignorance of most Republicans reached the same level as my prior disdain for most Dems. The wool is just a different color.
Human Rights Watch Says It Warned U.S. Military of High Explosives That Went Unsecured in Iraq by William J. Kole VIENNA, Austria - An official with the group Human Rights Watch said Saturday he alerted the U.S. military in May 2003 to a cache of hundreds of warheads in Iraq containing high explosives but that the weapons still hadn't been secured when he left the area 10 days later. Peter Bouckaert, who heads the New York-based group's international emergency team, told The Associated Press he was shown a room "stacked to the roof" with surface-to-surface warheads on May 9, 2003, on the grounds of the 2nd Military College in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. Bouckaert said he gave U.S. officials the exact location of the warheads, but that by the time he left the area on May 19, 2003, he had seen no U.S. forces at the site, which he said was being looted daily by armed men... Clusterfvck. No Doubt.
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread IMVHO, it really is a shame that someone like Bush is able to beat a McCain in the primaries. I would not have voted for McCain against Gore, but I would've felt 10 times better about his competency to do the job if he had won.
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread Well Mike there’s not a whole lot I can do for you. As is typical with you when confronted with a contradictory argument you try to shut the other side up. At least you didn’t mention Kool Aid. I would give my own reasons for what I believe but I don’t like to give out personal information. Instead I offered the argument that Military officers do not “do or die”. They are too smart for that. For you to argue otherwise, that they blindly follow orders, tells me that your experience in the military was not typical. Moreover, if Bush had told the military to “do or die” then they wouldn’t be supporting him at the polls. It really is that simple. To this day military people don’t feel Bush told them to “do or die”. I can’t believe that you argue otherwise. Here is the real point to this weapons issue. The military did not include it in it’s mission to secure them. They were important enough for the IAEA to monitor yet not important enough to the military to track down. We should agree that if they were so important to the mission that someone somewhere would have had them on his to-do list. Since no one seems to know where they went off to, we should ask ourselves, “Why?” We were told that the reason for the war was to secure these weapons and the WMDs but the military’s actions clearly imply that securing the weapons was not the reason. Now I have my reasons for supporting the war, which had nothing to do with WMDs. It should be pretty clear now that the WMD argument was just a way to strong-arm the Democrats and the UN into supporting the war. It didn’t work on the UN. It did work on the Democrats. And you’re about to vote for someone who has less of a spine than France. Your candidate has less of a political backbone than France. France. If securing al Qaqaa wasn’t a priority then ask yourself, “Why?”. Your argument is that Bush ordered the soldiers to ignore the larger mission, secure the oil sites, get Saddam and yet leave themselves open to IEDs armed with explosives good enough to fire atomic weapons. Give me a break. Ahhh clear thinking. My compliments to DJPoopypants. Unfortunately I didn’t see your reply until I read the others. Okay so this is the way I take the story. Rumsfeld was pushing the military to use the minimum number of troops (Why? Because that’s been his MO since the 70s). The military starts with a high figure of, say, 500,000. Rumsfeld starts with 50,000 and they meet somewhere in the middle based upon the negotiated mission. The brass may have started off with a mission that included securing every bullet in Iraq or maybe just swaged the number of troops at twice the number they predicted. By the time Rumsfeld is done with them, they are no longer securing sites like Al Qaqaa or at least not tracking down all the explosives that the IAEA had been monitoring. So your choice d) is no longer on the to-do list. Now these generals are no idiots nor are they disloyal to their own men. They never would have negotiated and agreed to a mission that didn’t do all the necessary things. So if they didn’t track down these IAEA explosives, why did we go to war? If the Pentagon didn’t believe that the stated purpose of the war was securing the IAEA explosives then why did congress believe it? I don’t think congress bought it either and they sure didn’t tell us they didn’t buy it. The fact is that Kerry&Co. played dumb. You guys are about to vote for a guy who played dumb. The problem isn’t that Bush&Co. acted like an executive but that Kerry&Co. didn’t act like shareholders. Which is worse, a president who knows he doesn’t have to respect congress or a congress that doesn’t have to be respected? PS - http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137017,00.html so maybe someone did have it on his to-do list.
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread Ok. This is one of those moments when I realize with god aweful clarity that we are yacking on a message board. Attacking rattles off this long a$$ post and I was reading it. I was paying attention to his argument, sorting out his point of view. It was all going so well, I was really getting into it. This is serious stuff. Then I read this line. "My compliments to DJPoopypants." DJPOOPYPANTS! POOPY... PANTS. The irony, if that is the correct term, nearly made me fall out of my chair and I'm going to have to go back and re-read the last paragraph. I didn't get past DJPoopypants. P.S. no offense DJPoopypants. I dig the handle, its originality is unquestionable.
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread That is NOT what I said. I said that military officers who do not follow the orders of the civilians put in charge of the military do not typically have long military careers. Your insistence that officers can follow their own way and ignore the orders of the civilian leadership of the DoD and still have a long and fruitful military career is flat out wrong. And it's wrong because you are ignorant of how the military operates. Feel free to believe that the officers in the military can do what they want any time they want and still get make it to the highest echelons of the military. You'll be wrong, but if that's what you want to think, that's fine with me.
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread Well we're coming closer to agreement. You are putting the choice in terms of "following orders" or "not following orders". I would say that their careers depend on HOW they follow their orders and then I would say they wouldn't follow their orders in a way that would endanger their own men. The military expects a lot from their leaders and the 20 year career system of up or out culls out the best of the best when it comes to inteligently following orders and putting them into effect. I simply can't beleive that military leaders would play dumb or sell out their own men to help their careers.
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread You have the same link that is on the last page of the previous thread (part 1).... It was simply using selective info from the convoluted, unclear, lacking in real answers Pentagon briefing of a couple of days back..... As you can see in our "liberal" media, most of the attention has gone to the BL tape.... regardless of whether this whole explosives issue has really been addressed... And i doubt FNC and /or Matt Drudge have provided the necessary explanations......as hard as they tried to give any they could come up with.....
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread My guess on the whole weapons thing is that the Russians might have taken the most valuable ones, the US troops probably destroyed most of them and as we all know the Iraqi insurgency got a hold of enough of them to cause a lot of pain. As far as the number of troops issue goes, I'm on two minds about that. On the surface, more troops couldn't have hurt. On the other hand, on projects where managers get all the money they want, so little planning is done, the project fails. So more troops could have done no good if the commanders didn’t know what they should do. I can’t imagine the generals wouldn't have negotiated for a higher number if they felt the mission required it. So all in all, I think there's room for criticism but there's nothing definitive. I find it more interesting to try to figure out why things happened the way they did.
Missing 377 tons just a tiny fraction of munitions stashed across Iraq (AP) From the deserts of the south and west to the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq is awash in weapons sites some large, others small; some guarded, others not. Even after the U.S. military secured some 400,000 tons of munitions, as many as 250,000 tons remain unaccounted for... Welcome to your future if you keep this cabal in power, influence and authority.
Thanks for posting a story that shows that 377 tons of explosives are just 0.01% of all explosives in Iraq. Then add the fact that 217 tons were destroyed by our troops...
And you still are a whole googleplex of WMD's short of the reason for the invasion. Goalposts are heavy.
Or maybe you could read the9/11 report. Here's a link. Read it. http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/.../serialset/creports/pdf/fullreport_errata.pdf Only 858 pages.
I've both read it AND purchased it on iTunes such that I could listen to it while working from the laptop. R-E-A-D; it's good for you and it's good for...well, it's really good for you. Easier than lifting those posts, too.
Did you skip the part about faulty intelligence? Skip the part where Dems thought there were WMD there too? Come on, your party-line has even moved past this issue. And believe me, if Kerry could use this in public he would--except for the fact that if you would trumpet this on the stump, people would cite the 911 Report and Kerry's own words. The only ones still citing "no WMD" are people on message boards who are too ignorant to realize that the 911 Report is out there, came to a certain bipartisan conclusion after lengthy investigation.
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread You would say their careers depend on HOW they follow orders, but you would be wrong. You can choose to not believe that military leaders would not sell out their own men to advance their careers, but you would be wrong. I don't like to believe it either, but that's the way it is.
Re: 380 TONS of Explosives Missing in Iraq? Thread The Russians took them. That's really funny. I bet the French helped them do it.
I see. Your eyes did in fact pass over the part about faulty intelligence, but you did not comprehend that part. It's not about reading, it's about comprehending.
OK, then, let's apply that math to a different situation. It'd be funny, except American soldiers are dying. So that makes that very much not funny.