It was said before and during the war that Sadam and the Iraq army had better not use the chemical weapons. If I remember correctly Bush came out and threatened Sadam saying the retaliation with the use of nuclear weapons was not off the table. He later on stopped saying that. He also threatened Sadam and anyone in the Iraq army that the excuse of just following orders to use chemical weapons will not be a defense to using them in a war crimes court.

Is that enough to thwart the use of chemical weapons? I think it is a good possibility because as we all saw during the war that the Iraq army including the guard was a bunch cowards. But we will never know for sure.

Also, not sure if you read the entire article I posted but I suggest you do as there are other suggestions as to why the chemical weapons may not have been used.

This is another example of your (many) unwarranted assumptions. You (rather oversimply) assume that Saddam would have done something, and when he didn't, you demand an explanation, because you assume you are correct in believing that if he had them he would have used them. This is just like all your assumptions about where and why an enemy of the U.S. would or would not attack the U.S.: it is based solely upon your unfounded speculations, which you assume to be "true", and all your "questions" and backtracking follow thence.

He did use them -- or at least tried to.  All those SCUD missile attacks from Iraq toward US military bases constituted "USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS", and there are plenty of service member who came hone still exhibiting symptoms of chemical weapons. 

Chem weapon detectors were going off almost nightly for weeks as Iraq expended their supplies of rockets and chemical payloads.

There was also the problem of Iraq being under UN sanctions.  Inspectors were supposed to ensure the WMDs were not being stored or manufactured after the Kuwait invasion.  If the WMDs were discovered, Iraq would have had worse punishments instituted.

During Iraqi Freedom, trucks were seen moving something to Syria, but there was never any intel to identify what or the final destinations.  Now we've had chemical weapon attacks in Syria a couple of times at least. 

Go figure.

Basically everything you have said in this entire thread is false.

Believe what you want.  I guess you know more than President Trump does.


For what its worth, Kamehameha ceded Oahu and possibly Kauai to the British in exchange for his help in conquering the other islands, but that doesn't mean he didn't also accept and ask for help/arms from the Americans.

Speculative on your part, but indeed a possibility.


Anyhow, like virtually every other person with your point of view on Hawaiian sovereignty, you just choose to completely ignore historical facts and place the blame on everyone except Kamehameha and his lineage, whom are solely responsible for giving away, selling, and/or losing the islands.

Off topic, but the Annexation of Hawaii by the US in 1898 was illegal based on US Constitutional Law; a discussion for another thread.

This is why I conceded that your position may be entirely true.  All I am saying is there are a number of credible positions on this matter.  The truth will come out eventually like in the case of the Gulf of Tonkin, where the US government itself decided to come clean.  Having said that, I do not understand why some posters in this thread are hell bent in keeping a closed mind to other potential outcomes when there exists cases where the prevailing view of a particular event was later determined to be false.

Kuleana

Once again, I am not saying what you presented is false, but there is other credulous assessments of what the truth really is that needs to be considered.  However, unless you have first-hand eye witness accounts from Iraq, I am sure you and everyone in this forum are not saying that you know more than President Trump does.

Once again, I am not saying what you presented is false, but there is other credulous assessments of what the truth really is that needs to be considered.  However, unless you have first-hand eye witness accounts from Iraq, I am sure you and everyone in this forum are not saying that you know more than President Trump does.

You say I keep unwarranted assumptions. Everyone else's counterarguments are based on their own assumptions of what they perceive the truth is as well.

Yes I do. Because you have no evidence at all to support your speculations about an enemy targeting, or not, particular locations in the U.S.  Neither you, nor anyone else, has any way of knowing with any degree certainty what an enemy will do, especially given that some of the enemies may be not be "rational actors". Various posters have provided either some historical evidence or some other basis for their speculations, but none of them, including you could honestly say that you can accurately predict the future... perhaps suggest that some probabilities are more likely than others, but even there it's still speculation.

It appears to me that just because you disagree with my contentions, you overanalyze my statements and pass summary judgements based on your own opinion of what you speculate my intentions truly are.

I've said that your contentions are mere speculations, and that you presented them as if they were not, yet you have no evidence that would lead one to rationally conclude that they are anything other than mere speculations. I'm not sure why you'd claim that merely pointing out the fallaciousness of your claims is "over analyzing", but whatever. Not sure why you'd use the legal term "summary judgement [sic]" here. This isn't civil litigation and, to my knowledge, neither party has requested summary judgment. But whatever. I have never once, either directly or indirectly, made any reference to your "intentions", much less speculated about them, so I have no idea what you are referring to. But whatever.

Totally cool with that, but to disqualify my view without presenting any factual documentation of your own, unlike how Inspector has, makes you incredulous.

Huh? I never "disqualified" your "view", but pointed out that what you were presenting as "factual" about the future was mere speculation. I never presented any counter scenarios as being necessarily more likely, because I know that I don't know what might happen in the various military scenarios discussed (especially if they involve someone who is not "a rational actor"). I also know that you don't know, and that you have no evidence that would convince anyone that your speculations are anything more than speculations. "Incredulous"? Yeah, why would I be anything but incredulous about your fantasy scenarios? However, your "argument" that because I don't present any "factual documentation" (for things I never claimed anyway) nor present any evidence to (impossibly) "prove a negative" re your claims therefore I'm "incredulous" is logically false, and just plain false as well.

You keep repeating that we must not know more than President Trump does.  Trump was not in the military in the 90s and beyond.  He was not the CinC before 2017.  He should not be expected to know more than those with decades of military and DoD civilian/contractor service.

Why is Trump your "go to" litmus test for the information we have?

Trump gets briefs and has access to current INTEL on the situations in the world.  He is not going to be the Captain of the destroyer launching Tomahawks.  He's not flying the drones that take out terrorists.  He's not driving the tank on the forward line into Afghanistan.

If you have a point, then say it.  Otherwise the snarky "you don't know more than Trump" BS is just an irrelevant deflection.  Being President does not make one immediately more knowledgeable than those who have been professionals in the defense of the US.  I'd go so far as to say you are probably among the LEAST knowledgeable of the military on  this forum judging by the comments you make which are void of any real understanding of DoD tactics, strategies, missions or security posture.

Apparently you did not read the article I posted.  If you had, it also documented how President Bush, Secretary of the State Powell, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld all admitted to varying degrees that there were no evidence of WMDs after the debacle invasion of Iraq in 2003.  The point I have stated and provided evidence is that there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Kuleana

The soldiers at the blast crater sensed something was wrong.

It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake.
The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.

Two technicians assigned to dispose of munitions stepped into the hole. Lake water seeped in. One of them, Specialist
Andrew T. Goldman, noticed a pungent odor, something, he said, he had never smelled before.

He lifted a shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling.

The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical
warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.

All three men recall an awkward pause. Then Sergeant Duling gave an order: “Get the hell out.”

Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had entered an expansive but largely secret
chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were
wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews
with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act.

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.

The New York Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve or mustard
agents after 2003. American officials said that the actual tally of exposed troops was slightly higher, but that the government’s official
count was classified.

The secrecy fit a pattern. Since the outset of the war, the scale of the United States’ encounters with chemical weapons
in Iraq was neither publicly shared nor widely circulated within the military. These encounters carry worrisome implications now that the
Islamic State, a Qaeda splinter group, controls much of the territory where the weapons were found.

The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from
military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous
jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.

“I felt more like a guinea pig than a wounded soldier,” said a former Army sergeant who suffered mustard burns in 2007 and was
denied hospital treatment and medical evacuation to the United States despite requests from his commander.

Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what
they had found. “ 'Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was
present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets
unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.

Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company,
joked of “wounds that never happened” from “that stuff that didn’t exist.” The public, he said, was misled for a decade.
“I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ ” he said. “There were plenty.”

I truly, truly hate having to force-feed anyone information that has already been sourced.  All you have to do is READ IT!

THERE WERE CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN IRAQ.  THE INFORMATION ON WHAT WE FOUND WAS CLASSIFIED.

NOW THAT THE INFORMATION IS CLEARED FOR RELEASE, PEOPLE JUST WON'T ACCEPT IT.  THEY PREFER THE "BUSH LIED" BULLSHIT STORY.

Why is that so hard to understand?


The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: October 14, 2014

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0

Based on your information, are you concluding then that President Bush, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice all were lying when they backtracked on their initial claims of WMD in Iraq in the article I shared in my last post?

Lying?  Depends on the definition.  Refusing to disclose classified information before the originator authorizes it's disclosure is more like it.

Just because Obama and Biden couldn't keep their yaps shut, divulging classified information while bragging publicly, doesn't mean all administrations are allowed to do it.

Well then, you just explained why I do not take anything the government says at face value.  Based on the evidence you presented, that was published years after the events occurred, a nation's populace should always be open minded to other potential realities, since new evidence can surface and disprove what was the accepted truths in the past.


Kuleana   

So, does that mean you now believe there were WMDs in Iraq??

Based on the evidence you provided, yes.  No strong evidence of nuclear or biological based weapons, but definitely strong evidence that there were albeit outdated/aging/unaccounted/etc. chemical weapons in Iraq.

However, you still did not comment on whether my contention that the US Government does occasionally lie/misinform/whatever; hence, taking what the US Government issues as the truth with a grain of salt is justified.

The government does not have the ability to make sensitive, personal or national security information public.  I've always accepted that the public bases opinions on imperfect information, and sometimes misinformation.  That's why I don't like to argue with conspiracy theorists (even if Omni thinks I am one!).

We have to operate on the assumption the government is doing what it must to keep us safe.  That's why when Obama and Clinton lied to the public about Benghazi, not for national security or public safety,. but for political campaign damage control, it burned me up! 

Faith and trust shouldn't be blind, but it does need to exist to some degree, or else you'll be looking for lies in everything the government tells us, even if the story they tell actually seems the most plausible and reasonable.

How does it feel to have your entire Bush/Iraq War dogma dismantled after preaching "They lied" for so long?   

The good news is, they really did lie, but after the operation -- not before!   

I said I would not necessarily take anything the government says at face value.  I did not say I don't believe in anything the government says.

Very different.