GarryB wrote:When asked to show their evidence both the US and Israel can come up with nothing to clearly show anything.
Which is partly my point, you can't really make a complete, 100% judgment one way or the other based on a lack of credible evidence in either direction.
The current embargo imposed on Iran arbitrarily by the EU and US and freezing of Iranian assets suggests their need to produce their own fuel is perfectly sensible... what is the point in spending trillions of dollars on civilian power generation if your enemies can deny you the fuel it needs to do its job?
Yeah, but then again where is the fuel supposed to go? They aren't sprouting reactors left and right but they for damn sure are working away at expanding enrichment. That's part of the problem. "We're using it for power so STFU". Well, then why aren't there power plants appearing? They've been enriching for long enough that you'd expect them to appear. Plus, if they were going to build the plants you might think that starting construction would be a gigantic middle finger to the Iran has/wants a bomb crowd.
So what you are saying is that they are following the rules as set by the NPT that gives them the right to civilian nuclear power generation technology and the US and Israel and the west in general are abusing that system to try to spy on Iran, making outrageous demands for inspections and generally just being real pricks about things and still pulling claims from their asses that Iran is building nuclear weapons with no evidence at all.
The problem is that a few inspectors in the enrichment complexes would settle the issue provided they had the right type of access.
If Iran had broken any rules there would be no amgibuity here... they don't have to be caught with bombs, just breaking the rules would be enough, but they can't even prove that. The US interferes with the inspection process and tries to make their findings vague and open to debate. Findings from the inspectors that there is no evidence they are not making bombs is the height of duplicity... how do you prove that?
Again, exactly. The whole process has gotten completely retarded.
Let US weapons inspectors visit every potential bombing target in Iran and let them record where everything worth bombing is so the US military can mark it on their maps... hopefully noting where the Chinese embassy is of course...
Hell all you really have to see are the enrichment complexes, and then only to see what level the uranium is enriched to. Past a certain threshold and you are definitely not sticking it into a nuclear power plant.
Tony BLiar said they had enormous amounts that were 45 minutes from being used... in other words deployed and ready for use within units.
The reality turned out there were a few old caches left over from the Iran Iraq war that weapon inspectors and the Iraqis themselves had forgotten about... hardly a smoking gun.
I won't ever argue that the intel was incorrect. But when it was pre-existing prior to the 2000 election you can't claim it was all completely fabricated either.
Saddam was guilty of only one crime... he wanted his oil exports paid in Euros instead of US dollars. There was no available legitimate reason to attack and invade Iraq... otherwise they could have used it instead of making sht up about WMDs. The fact that the Oilfields were secured and the cities and museums were left suggests it was always about oil and nothing to do with freedom or democracy or indeed "peace". Please don't insult our intelligence by suggesting it was anything but an imperial power ensuring the oil flows and its own position is maintained.
We still haven't reached Saddam-era levels of oil importation from Iraq. 2001: 290,000 barrels. 2012: 173,000 barrels. That's quite a bit less for supposedly wanting to take control of their oil supply, and the average figures from 2004 to 2012 actually are trending
downward. My theory is that Bush decided that we were done with Saddam, and given the Afghani quagmire at the time figured it'd be a "win" to get people's minds off of how screwed up Afghanistan was quickly becoming.
There was no available legitimate reason to attack and invade Iraq
Attack, yes, invade, no.
What is this backing down BS? Since when has Putin said using chem or bio weapons on your own people is OK? Unlike the west Putin is the only consistent voice out there... the west largely ignored when Saddam gassed some Kurds who opposed his rule in the mid 1980s... it was only after he got into their bad books that cries of "he gassed his own people" were heard from every western news outlet and government official. Of course it would be more accurate to say he gassed some people who lived on Iraqi territory that wanted him dead...
Someone suggested that Putin's considering of UNSC action constituted backing down, hence the "'s. Plus back in the mid-80s nobody gave the Middle East the same attention it gets now. There was something else going on, I forget what...
Which is what happens when you don't have allies... you have interests.
Can't really argue there.
So he wants to get the western military power involved to get it all sorted out much quicker? Hard to believe... there are plenty of artillery weapons that could have been used to kill civilians much more efficiently than that if that was the problem...
Maybe with all of the waffling over the past, what, year+?, he figured we still wouldn't do anything. Hell, in the case of the UK, he would've been right!
Yeah... why can't the Syrian Army of conscripts defeat international battle hardened terrorists with support from Saudi Arabia and Washington easily?
It's not like they're setting up Patriot batteries or flying F-15Es.
I mean the only superpower left could easily deal with a few primitive mountain men in Afghanistan and they left Iraq in a state of peace and tranquillity, not to mention both countries are transformed from dictatorships to flourishing democracies... or not.
I'd argue that the differences there are 1) fighting on someplace that's
not your own soil, and 2) a complete balls-up when it came to actually predicting what would happen post-Saddam in Iraq. Tribal and sectarian allegiances were
significantly underestimated under the false impression that everyone would jump for joy at being an Iraqi no longer under Saddam.
Sorry, but that logic fails... if Assad wanted to get tough and show the bad guys who is boss then he should be claiming responsibility for using the chem weapons... which he is not.
...because now he realizes that we're going to stick our noses in once again, perhaps. The "red line" statement was made prior to the first allegations of chem use, almost a year ago.
This is not the first time chem weapons have been used in this conflict... it is the first time where the west thinks assad might have been responsible... which means most likely previous times it was most likely the rebels... which suggests to me that it is the rebels again, but this time with spin to make it seem like it was the government.
Got me. Although I do seem to recall a few previous instances where it was thought that Assad's forces might have done it, but that it wasn't able to be proved, or something. The 19 March attack was one, Assad did refuse UN access after that one and it was reported that the UK, France, and the US thought Assad's guys did it. Plus it is amusing that the one day in a week where the winds blow back towards rebel positions...Ghouta gets chemmed.
BTW Assad turned away from Russia and was reaching out to the west... Russia has no extreme reason to be their buddies... this is not about Russia defending its buddy, this is about Russia defending the current victim of western bullying.
Which could also be interpreted as Russia defending part of its sphere of influence, which it believes is shrinking due to Western political influence expanding.
You mean like Afghanistan?
Another example!
Most of the lines on the maps in the Middle East were arbitrarily drawn to divide up the areas of know oil by the British and the French after the defeat of Germany in the early 1920s... the so called royal families in the region are a joke and "ruled" since that period (1920s)...
No disagreement there.
At any rate, were it me, wouldn't have gone into Iraq. Not worth the bother. Would've probably made Afghanistan into very small rocks. No other treatment required. Libya? Hell, Muammar wanted to play nice, didn't he? And for damn sure wouldn't be trying to "fix" Syria. Internal issues should be handled internally, period, end of story, there are no grey areas (Rwanda) and by the way, if you wanna overthrow your government, might want to make sure it's actually realistic before you start shooting. 'Cause it seems like there's a lot of evidence that it pisses them off when you try. And, Since Syria is NOT a signatory of the chemical weapons treaty, then the only people Assad would need to answer to were his own electorate as far as I'm concerned. "Chemicals are illegal"...sure, if you agreed to it. Although, if he managed to gas someplace too close to a border and floated some sarin into Turkey say, I might've been inclined to watch the Turks go ape and do some damage.
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