Unfortunately, Saddam caved and let the inspectors without restriction after that November 9th vote. We still declared him in material breach for not showing us all the WMDs we knew he must be hiding somewhere.

Going to war despite Saddam allowing inspections is what the Times means by “the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives at the time.”

A stunning statement by Thrasymachus. For him, Hussein’s massive concealment and coverup as detailed by Powell at the UN doesn’t mean anything, or never even happened.

Resolution 1441 didn’t say, “Compliance means admitting inspectors and letting them travel around Iraq searching for things that you are hiding.” It said, “Compliance means total revealing by you of everything, period. Any resistance, any concealment, means serious consequences.”

But the antiwar people are stuck in their distorted picture and will never give it up. It truly gets tiresome hearing the same falsehoods over and over.

Which parts of Powell’s allegations at the UN turned out to be true exactly? Was there even a single point that the facts later backed him up on?

I was reasonably pro-War until the inspections turned up nothing. (Though I had reservations before then.) At that point I started to get the feeling that there was a good chance that our WMD intelligence might be mistaken. I considered Bush’s invasion with no “smoking gun” (I hate the term) to be a gamble.

We now know that Saddam did not possess WMDs. The gamble did not pay off, and it turned out the intelligence was wrong.

Thrasy is engaging in the changing of subject that people do when they’re not being honest. Thrasy’s earlier point was that Hussein had complied with Resolution 1441 and that therefore when Bush made war Bush had “rejected diplomacy.” As soon as I called Thrasy out on that, he switches to the different subject of the existence of WMDs. The ultimate existence of the WMDs in Iraq is not the subject here. Resolution 1441 was not an assertion as to the ultimate reality of WMDs. Resolution 1441 was a total, final demand that Hussein take positive steps to reveal everything he had and everything he had had, that he eliminate all ambiguity about what he had. He manifestly failed to do that. And that meant war, ACCORDING TO THE DIPLOMATIC PROCESS THAT THE U.S. AND THE ENTIRE SECURITY COUNCIL AGREED TO.

This is not about Bush. This is about lies being told by the antiwar left and right. And, after certain facts are well known and established, I am not going to tolerate people posting at this board bringing up lies about them, and lies about America’s own conduct. Hussein’s lack of compliance with 1441 is a fact. The U.S. acted honestly and honorably with regard to 1441, and was stabbed in the back by the very parties who had signed that resolution. This is not some distant historical event about which the facts are uncertain. We all observed this happening as it was happening.

End of subject.

I am uncertain where I changed the subject or dodged any questions exactly.

I thought that my comment was a direct reply to this statement: “For him, Hussein’s massive concealment and coverup as detailed by Powell at the UN doesn’t mean anything, or never even happened.”

And so I asked my two questions about the Powell speech above.

The rest was in reply to my being grouped in with the “the antiwar people” who are “stuck in their distorted picture and will never give it up.”

I certainly fail to see any lack of honesty on my part. Perhaps any dishonest statements that I have made could be pointed out.

Correction. Thrasy did not _immediately_ change the subject. Before changing the subject, he asked a disingenuous question about which of Powell’s allegations of massive coverup “turned out” to be true. The question is disingenuous on two counts. First, T is pretending not to know the well-known facts, and expects me to rehearse them all for him; if he doesn’t know them by now, he has no right to be participating in this discussion and wasting my time. Second, his expression, “turned out to be true,” suggests that the cover-up had to be fully desmontrated at some later point. But the facts of the cover-up were present in the facts Powell was re-counting: the moving around of materials, the phone calls among Iraqi officials to hide things, the photos showing where objects had recently been but disappeared, as well as the obfuscation in the written documents provided by the Iraqis. The refusal to comply was not some hypothesis to be proved at some later point; it was manifest then, and certified by Blix and everyone else.

I find Thrasy disingenuous in a third sense, in his sheer intellectual laziness by which, month after month, he just throws out the same discredited statements, backing up the New York Times’s vicious lies, never taking responsibility for the fact that some things are false and some things are true.

There are plenty of legitimate areas of disagreement about the war. But the idea that America “rejected diplomacy” and shunned the UN is a Big Lie, an anti-American lie, and I will not entertain it at this site.

“We now know that Saddam did not possess WMDs.” I was told that it is very hard to prove a negative. Has Thrasymachus managed to do so? Just to take one possibility, is it truly impossible that WMDs were removed to Syria and/or Lebanon in the months before the war started? “We have not yet found WMDs in Iraq” is a statement that would not be disputed on this board, I would think. But that is not the same statement, is it?

I am sure that Thrasymachus would not object if Bush’s defenders were saying things like, “We now know that Saddam sent all his WMDs to Syria.” Facts and possibilities are hardly the same.

I had not meant to replay to this any more, but today CNN has more on “Hussein’s massive concealment and coverup as detailed by Powell at the UN.”

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/04/03/iraq.main/index.html