[lbo-talk] I don't get it...

[andie nachgeborenen]

Whose burden of proof here? It's reasonable to believe
that the US govt is lying when it moves its lips.
Also, Iraq had been under sanctions and an inspection
regime for years, so if no weapons had showed up, it
was reasonable to accept that they had been destroyed.
Against this you come up with "common sense: what
dictator woulfd give up such weapons?" Which is pretty
feeble, you think it through. I also agree with Carol,
btw, if SH had the bomb and 150 tons of anthrax and
god knows what else, he had exactly as much right to
such things (none at all) as the US govt, so his
hypotheticak possession was not a causys belli. Why
are you bringing this old stuff up anyway?

--- Brian Siano <siano at mail.med.upenn.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:24:09 -0400, Chuck0
> <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> 
> > Brian Siano wrote:
> >
> >> Even antiwar activists were vocal on the point
> that much of Saddam's WMD 
> >> armory was real, because we kept commenting on
> how we'd sold it to him 
> >> in the first place, and all the U.S had to do to
> confirm the stockpiles 
> >> was to check the sales receipts (pace Bill
> Hicks).
> >
> > Speak for yourself. Most of the anti-war activists
> I know were pretty 
> > skeptical of all the bullshit about Saddam's WMD.
> 
> I'd make a clarification here: most antiwar
> activists I know were skeptical 
> over what _George Bush_ was claiming-- it wasn't
> based on anything more 
> than a reflexive stance. With a few exceptions, I
> saw very little 
> substantive argument from the Left that Saddam had
> no WMDs. (Noam Chomsky 
> might've gone over the weapons inspectors' reports
> carefully, but Chomsky's 
> exceptional in the best ways.) Most of the people
> I'd encountered 
> understood that, while Bush was probably
> exaggerating how much weaponry 
> Saddam had, and his willingness to use it, more
> likely than not Saddam 
> probably had _something_. As I'd written before, to
> believe otherwise would 
> have violated common sense; what dictator would give
> up such weapons?
> 
> The point is that the belief that Saddam had WMDs
> was not unreasonable. 
> And, at the time, if anyone on the Left was denying
> it entirely, it wasn't 
> based on anything but suspicion of the U.S.'s
> motives. And up until the 
> invasion, the only way to verify anything was to be
> there, on site, with 
> the inspectors. So faulting the media for not
> adopting this particular 
> view, from the vantage of 20/20 hindsight, is sort
> of disingenuous.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ___________________________________
>
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