We're not talking about inventorying boxes of cracker jacks here.
You need to read up on the law of the conservation of mass. Here's a word problem: If he had x amount of WMD's at some point, and he used y, then, by the law of the conservation of mass, he should have or be able to account for x-y. Like I said, it's not boxes of cracker jacks that are relatively unimportant, we're talking about WMD's.
Take a look at:
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See above re: the law of the conservation of mass, and snopes.com and truthorfiction.com links about what the Dems, including what both Clintons, Kerry, and Robert "Sheets" Byrd were saying - not only after Clinton, but during Clinton's admin. Kind of hard for Bush to gen up false intel during the Clinton admin,. dontcha think?
Uh - whatever.
Yes - the French and Russians were trying to conceal their cashing in on the Oil for Food programs. They didn't want to mess up the good thing they had going with Saddam.
Ummm - by inventory records. The UN as well as Dems in Congress sure seemed to think he should have been able to. At the very best, he was a victim of his own sloppy record keeping.
From the snopes page - a quote of H. Clinton: ""In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002
The Al Qaida connection has been re-proven since our intel flaws have been brought to light.
Also - read a book called "The Third Terrorist" by Jayna Davis. Documents thoroughly Sadam's conection to the OK City bombing.
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')
The US Army has been all over Iraq looking for WMD. You know damn well that the Republicans have been praying daily to God asking for the army to find bombs because if no WMD's are discovered by 2008 that fact will be hammered over and over and they are going to take a pretty serious political loss for it.
The army found Saddam, and his 2 psychotic sons, and it's a lot easier to hid a person, who can easily move from place to place, than a bomb which can be found by a Geiger counter.
Saddam didn't have nukes by the time of the invasion, simple as that. About the most you could possibly argue is he snuck them into Syria sometime before the war, but very few are going to believe it.
And as for biological WMD's or nerve gas or some other scenario, those simply aren't very good WMD's. Gas dissapates and if your enemy knows your going to use it, they can easily take precautions. And other biological agents like germ warfare kill indiscriminitely and you could easily cause a plague that would wipe out your own people too, they are very unstable weapons. And frankly, none of those have the sheer phychological value of a nuke - if gas or germ warfare was so good, why didn't we use them on Hiroshima instead of a nuke?
Saddam was a great bluffer in his day, and most of the rumors of Iraq having WMDs were undoubtedly plants designed to scare his neighbors.
Anyway, as I've observed over and over again, there were a lot of far more valid reasons to invade Iraq than WMDs. Such as the government there routinely using torture. Why are people so squeamish about the US going in to a country and blowing away psychotic rulers? Do Americans think it's a good thing to leave people like this up and in operation? Do they really think any other countries are going to step in and put a stop to it?
Considering that Al Qaida has a lot of people who are probably members of other terrorist organizations, it would he extremely unusual if among all the criminals that Saddam helped out, that none of them happened to be part of Al Qaida. But that does not mean that there were any high-level connections between Saddam's government and Al Quaida.
The problem with the Iraq war is that it should have been OVER a long time ago. It was frankly disrespectful of the Republican-controlled congress to not issue a formal declaration of war against Iraq, and to allow Bush unlimited time to deploy the Army in there. That is NOT what the US Constitution says is allowable and I thought you conservatives were big supporters of the Constitution. It is also disrespectful of Bush to make such an early declaration of the end of hostilities there when soldiers are still getting killed. If the war is over, then the US Army should LEAVE. And it is a crime that there's been such a lack of basics like Kevlar boots, which keep soldier's feet from being blown off by mines, and a lack of hardened HumVees - there's only one company in the country that retrofits them and they are way, way behind. When soldiers are welding scrap metal to vehicles in Iraq because some bean counter in the Pentagon is too busy playing politics, that person should be in the front lines not behind a desk! And this business of pulling in National Guard - if Bush wants to fight a war and there's not enough soldiers, then he should have activated the draft - otherwise why the hell are we still to this day registering kids for Selective Service. What a waste of money - they claim that they need a S.S. bureau in case of a draft - but when there's a lack of soldiers they don't turn on the draft!!!
Bush has run the Iraq war in the most half-assed way imaginable, just like he's running FEMA and the rest of the bureaus in the Executive branch. That is the problem.
I don't at all disagree with much (not all) of what you said. Some things are black, some things are gray, some things are white. When people say that something is one when it is the other, I may choose to speak out. You really ought to read that book by Jayna Davis ("The Third Terrorist") about the OK City bombing. It truly does document that Sadam sent some of his Republican Guard boys over here to assist in that operation (though the training that our lily whites got was in the Philipines). It also clearly documents how screwed up our FBI was at the time - clearly an intentional cover up from above of the facts that would have blown the top off of that whole thing. Senator Spector was part of the coverup.
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Retired Shop Rat: 14,647 days in a GM plant. Now I can do what I enjoy: Large Format Photography
Yep, I think that is a large part of what happened. Saddam wanted people to think he had such weapons and managed to provide the justification for invasion by doing so. His bluff got called.
IMO, the "problem" is that the modern US is not at all geared up for playing the army of occupation role and is making a hash of it. Of course if our country and military were programmed to be effective conquerors and occupiers then there would be an even bigger set of problems!
You're right - I assumed 200 miles on a typical intermediate car gas tank of 11 or 12 gallons, so to get 600 mile range, I tripled the gas tank size. That works out to about 18 mpg - today's car doesn't get much better than that in city driving - but that also was part of your point.
Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')
R Steeners> Interesting point. I think that the goal of having a 600 mile range on
Well, I am writing from Minnesota. We don't have many hills here. But, the 175 lbs is total weight for a 25 gallon gas tank, the incremental difference from say 12 gallons is not 175, but would be about 90 pounds. For better, gas mileage people are encouraged to not carry around a lot of stuff in their trunks and their is value in that but, if 90 pounds or 200 pounds affects mileage more than .3 or .5 miles per gallon I would be disappointed with my car. My basic point, is that I like the idea or having a range of 600 miles for a vehicle. Of course not all vehicles are equal either but, for cars it would be nice if they could get 25 mpg or so. However, it might be impossible to have a V-8 SUV or pickup truck with a lot of towing capacity be able to get
25 or even 20 mpg. Maybe the max there would be 16 mpg in which case the gas tank might need to be 40 gallons. For a 12,000 lb truck with 6 or 7 mpg maybe a 100 gallon tank would be unreasonable and maybe some classes of vehicles would be excluded but, I still like being able to go along way without stopping for gas a lot.
"Matt Whiting" wrote in message news:0UjXe.851$ snipped-for-privacy@news1.epix.net...
My 2005 Ford F-450 4x4 Crew Cab (10,000 pounds full of fuel and unloaded)
6.0L Power Stroke Diesel carries 59 gallons of diesel (Just shy of 420 pounds of diesel fuel). (Diesel weighs about 7.1 pounds per US gallon) (Gasoline weighs about 6.2 pounds per US gallon) This truck Gets 14.5 miles per gallon. That equals 855 miles per fill up. :-) At over $3.00 per gallon, that's over $185 to fill up. :-(
Why not add hurricane testing to federl crash standards too? Then you don;'t have to worry about the vehicles range. It's makes just as much sense as your suggestion.
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