The article doesn't say so. Personally, I think that there very likely are WMDs in Iraq, or Iraqi WMDs in Syria, and that as every sane person feared, Bush-2's war made it almost impossible for the West to secure them.
Its hard to get an accurate picture of what is going on on the ground. There was an overwhelming chorus of 'why are we doing more about Kobane! - yet yesterday the Kurds struck back seizing a strategically important hill backed by US air strikes: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29611673 As far as the initial comments - this is probably a case of Stewart not seeing the forest for the trees. The Pentagon is really good at handling disinformation. The 'we aren't going to be involved in Kobane' was probably just that. Aurora's thread showed live tweets of strikes there a couple of days ago. The BBC is reporting 20+ airstrikes over the last 2 days: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29617941
He was criticizing them for not conducting air strikes on an armored force that was moving in the open - something that should have been an easy target - after all of that rhetoric about how ISIS was this huge threat and needed to be dealt with strongly. Frankly I agree with him in as far as us walking the walk if we're going to talk the talk. Although to be honest, I don't see how ISIS is our problem.
So suddenly Jon Stewart is a Credible News Source because he's said something the warmongers approve of.
Its hard to fact check current military movements. There's quite a few things that I'd take Stewart's team's word for it - they are exceptional at revealing hypocrisy and confirming economic and social data. Where we are bombing right now? Sorry, not my go to source for that.
We can't conduct any serious airstrikes in Kobani because we don't have people on the ground to make sure we're not hitting Kurdish fighters and civilians. From Demiurge's BBC link you can see how many strikes the coalition is conducting on a daily basis, which is 4.2 strikes/day in Iraq and 8.1 strikes/day in Syria. During the Gulf War even subcategories of airstrikes blew these numbers out of the water. Typically we'd fly over a hundred airstrikes a day just to suppress enemy air defenses. In the Gulf War, the average tonnage per day delivered per aircraft was 1.1 for the F-117, 2.71 for the F-15, 1.93 for the F-16, and 0.74 for the F-18. And it added up, because we attacked with 1,875 aircraft. So the tonnage delivered by the F-117 (we only had 42) was 1,990 tons, while the F-16's delivered a whopping 20,866 tons. It was a non-stop rain of death, with 226,833 bombs dropped. I'd be surprised if the current operations have even dropped a thousand bombs. We aren't really trying to win.
I did read the article all the way through. It said that soldiers found old chemical weapons containing mustard gas buried in certain spots in Iraq. Soldiers were getting hurt by them and the government not only refused to treat them, but kept the wile thing quiet because the weapons were built in the US and illegal. It likely has some CIA connection as well as Cheney Rumsfeld connection. The weapons were left over from the Iraq-Iran war.
I'm not conversant on how seriously we are really taking this. I think we are probably taking saving Badhdad a hell of a lot more seriously than Kobane. But while I"m sure your tonnage rates are accurate, we are looking at an entirely different type of engagement. For one, despite all the constant CNN focus on it, we were only looking at 10% of the munitions being dropped being smart bombs. That number is almost universal now, unless we are specifically going for a dispersed strike. So the tonnage is less, the effectiveness on the targests may be similar. And of course in 1991 the Iraqi army was the 5th largest in the world with one of the most formidable air defense systems in the world. Their problem is they were 20 years behind in tech, which was fatal. The Pentagon has said a few times now they don't think they can win this through the air war alone. And while the Kurds are a fairly effective fighting force (though need armaments) the Iraqis are completely breaking apart. Their C&C has distenigrated due to the political problems of the changing regimes. They cannot make any movement against ISIS.
Well, another huge difference is that we haven't had any buildup of forces in the area remotely on the level of what we saw prior to the Gulf War or the Iraq War. We're flying from just two carriers, both positioned quite far from Syria (one in the Red Sea, of all places) and no longer have a huge Air Force presence sitting in Saudi Arabia. So our sortie rate is extremely low. During four years in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2010, there were only 5 months when we attacked this infrequently. The numbers are about on par with the number of daily bomb releases we had in Iraq during the occupation, years after Saddam was gone. It's the level we use for going after uncoordinated insurgents planting IED's, not what we use to stop an army. But things are looking up. The operation finally got a name. "Inherent Resolve." They perhaps thought of calling it "Obvious Resolve", or something connoting actually doing something, but those ideas probably got laughed out of the room.
That's just the New York Times spinning like a top. We were always running across Saddam's chemical weapons, and it was reported freely by the Pentagon, such as this 2006 press release. By then the US press didn't want to print anything about it because it might undermine their narrative, so most people who didn't read right-wing news or military blogs were unaware. We even flew out tons of uranium he'd stockpiled - badly.
Oh really? If you just read the New York Times or Washington Post, then you're only now learning that we were finding chemical weapons all over Iraq. The rest of us already knew. So now they're claiming the reason their readers had never heard about it was because the Pentagon was keeping it quiet. The 2006 press release is pretty clear evidence that it wasn't the Pentagon that was mum about it.
And you believe that these remnants from a discontinued program constitute the same thing as what Bush used to justify invasion? As a follow-up, if they even remotely represented such, why would the Bush admin have covered things up?
So someone has to either agree 100% with someone on everything or disagree with them 100% on everything according to you. Setting aside the whole "I agree with him on this point" aspect of my last post, I'd love to see you attempt to back up your claim. Go ahead. Prove it. Quote one of my posts.
They actually were what he used, along with Saddam's refusal to comply with the long list of UN resolutions, and the threat that he could restart his programs at any time. Iraq War Resolution. The part the messed up was that Saddam's nuclear weapon program was pretty much dead and his biological programs were halted, whereas we thought they were still active. His arsenals were unquestioned, and real, as were all the other stated reasons for invasion.
No, he just got caught committing a rare act of journalism because our efforts were just begging to be lampooned. There are some set ups so juicy that even a left-wing comedian can't pass them up.
(A) He's not a journalist (B) We'll see how long this bromance lasts before he hurts the Right's widdle feelings again
It's not a bromance, it's just noting that the Administration's efforts are so pathetic that even Jon Stewart is mocking them.
Did I call him one? Seems to me I only agreed with him on a point. But I see you're backing down from your earlier assertion, which is as close as you'll get to admitting that you were wrong or overstepped.
You are so full of it. No WMDs were ever found. What was found was cannisters the Iraqi army disposed of during the 1980's Iran Iraq war because it was no longer servicable. They US did the same thing after WW1. Yoi conspiracy theory that WMDs were found but that the media all hushed it up is delusional nonsense only believed by drooling idiots. This is why so many people say the right wing lives in a fact free fantasy world which is untouched by reality. Their stock and trade is nonsense and lies.
I remember when those empty canisters were found. -Jeriko was shitting himself with excitement. Good times. When they turned out to be duds, he spent a few weeks insisting "They're in Syria! Everybody knows they're in Syria!!!11!" and disappeared not long after that. Poor -Jeriko.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but we found thousands of WMD's. They weren't just empty canisters. Most were filled with mustard and sarin, but a few had VX. At least 17 soldiers were injured by them. Some were even used as IEDs. The Pentagon says we found about 5,000 in total, and the Iraqi government just said that about 1,500 chemical rockets stored outside Baghdad have fallen into ISIS's hands. ISIS has used chemical weapons in Kobani and in a few attacks in Iraq, but nobody is sure whether they had belonged to Assad or Saddam. Back in the Iraq war, soldiers used to post on the Internet about finding them. Every time they did, the left would say "but those aren't the weapons we were looking for! Those are old!" Their point was that the massive, active, weapons programs we expected weren't there. But there were plenty of old stockpiles. Wiki leaks even reported about it in 2010.
No. You are beyond being aimply wrong and are now simply in fact free lalaland. No usable WMDs were ever found in Iraq juat old abandoned in fill stuff which the Iraqi army disposes of 30 yeara prior as being ynservicable. If I wasn't on a cell phone right now I would post that video from Bush saying mo WMDs were ever found in Iraq. Knowing you though you'd claim Bush was in on the conspiracy. You're just barking at the moon now.
Oh, I'm sure gturner saw it discussed on a talk show, and perhaps Dayton read about it in his chicken coop, for that matter.
All I said was there were WMD's in Iraq. You disagreed with that. The article points out that there were WMD's, so I am not wrong. Are they the same WMD's that Bush used to justify the invasion, no, but they were there. That's all I said and you ran with it and even tried to say that they weren't there. It makes sense to me that if he had old WMD's and hid them, then he may have building new weapons and hid them as well. Here's the problem. We create our own problems and when they blow up in our faces, we have to go back and fix them and then people get pissed. Here's an idea, lets stay out of the Mid-East. Let's get off of foreign oil and take our toys and go home. It won't take long for the money to dry up and those countries will have to deal with their own problems. The only people I want to help over there at this point is the Kurds.
So everyone in all those documents that Wikileaks leaked was lying, but you believe Bush and Cheney. How the irony must burn! Iraq had plenty of chemical weapon stockpiles. The UN even monitored them - till they got thrown out. Saddam didn't have the giant, complicated incinerators that we do, so the best option was to just let the weapons sit in a bunker - and sit - and sit. What he didn't have was a still active biological and nuclear weapons program. We expected to find those, and we didn't, because he'd been lying about their existence to keep Iran from attacking him. As the chemical munitions were discovered by our forces, the left pointedly dismissed their existence as irrelevant because they weren't evidence of a major, ongoing program. Artillery shells are artillery shells, basically. HE is probably more effective than mustard anyway. We used to make our own troops sniff mustard gas in training. Anybody can make it. The problem was a country run by someone willing to use it - in massive quantities - on civilians.
