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We invaded Iraq on the pretense that they were getting yellowcake from Nigerian suppliers, and US suppliers were in Nigeria trying to sell yellowcake to Saddam Hussein. He wasn’t interested.
We knew he wasn’t interested because Joseph Wilson, a US diplomat, was involved in the efforts to make the sale. Hussein saw which way the wind was blowing.
When George W. Bush started talking about invading Iraq (in speeches blending vitriol against Hussein and anger over 9/11) Wilson published a report about how Hussein totally wasn’t buying Yellowcake, which he knew about. And in response, the Bush administration burned Valerie Plame, who was Wilson’s wife and an actual CIA operative who was active and abroad.
She made it home safely, and could no longer work as a CIA operative. In the cold war, burning a spy for political reasons showed CIA you were careless, and deserved to receive a tape of ten hours of your loved one screaming as she was tortured to death. But those were different times, and presidents then had a few more scruples (and knew not to do that).
According to Al Franken, about 75% of ground troops during the Iraq war believed they were there as revenge for the 9/11 attacks, even though Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. A friend of mine in Virginia noted his teen daughter was taught in American History we were provoked to go into Iraq because of the 9/11 attacks and the International War on Terror. I was around in 2003 watching Republicans nation wide saying torture is AOK and waterboarding isn’t really torture (until they went to have a SERE guy waterboard them for size. They all thought it was pretty terrible and even maybe torturous). Still, it was pretty clear that the IWoT and Iraq were separate things, even though the White House liked to conflate the two in speeches. Hussein and Al-Qaeda did not get along.
I remember the US attacked Iraq because Hussein allegedly had WMDs. The US couldn’t find any. The US had strong intel beforehand there were no WMDs in Iraq and that Iraq was still recovering from the 1990-1991 gulf war.
I think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney just wanted to kill and torture some Arabs for being too brown and because they couldn’t kill Saudis (like Osama Bin Laden, who figured largely in planning the 9/11 attacks). All the WMD nonsense was a deliberate lie.
They wanted to look like they were doing something in retaliation for 9/11.
Russia’s WMD can reach North America, that’s why.
there’s a difference between WMDs that work and rube goldberg war crime machines. why do you think all serious militaries ditched chemical weapons and go balls deep into PGMs? hint: it’s not for humanitarian reasons
True, but let’s not pretend that we actually found any substantial WMDs. We found 34 tons of mustard gas. At the time, the US had the most VX gas in the world.
every time VX gets mentioned i inevitably end up in a Wikipedia rabbit hole, it’s now been one and a half hours
And in theory they have enough working ones that at least one is guaranteed to slip through defenses
If you assume all Russian subs and planes can be sunk / shot down before they release their payloads, there’s still over 3000 land based ICBM warheads. There is no terminal phase missile defense system. Majority of the land based warheads will reach terminal phase. The extrapolation that the events in Ukraine mean that nuclear exchange between the two biggest nuclear nations is somehow survivable is both dumb and dangerous.
Well… The species will probably survive, as will a plethora of other species on the planet.
The things that definitely won’t survive are modern society and it’s status quo.
Nobody wants a nuclear war. I think we can all agree that it would be bad for an uncountable number of reasons.
Nobody wants a nuclear war.
Just a small one perhaps?
Okay you and Nuke can have a small one, as a treat.
Go play out back, have fun.
They were in their Church Clothes! How could you let them go out in the mud?!
Eh, it will vaporise.
Nobody wants a nuclear war
👀
Say no more, we (french) didnt invade Irak cause they didnt had WMD, so we will invade Russia because they have WMD!
And somehow, for some reason, you will rename french fries as: “Oppression fries”.
As much as I think the Iraq situation was total bullshit, there’s a difference between just beginning to develop nuclear weapons, and having a massive stockpile of functional nuclear weapons.
And there’s a difference between having a nuke and being able to nuke NYC.
This is not fair, Ukraine got to invade them, we should get to too!
It’s funny how the talk from Russia about using nukes if their international border was crossed vanished immediately after it was crossed. Hard to garner sympathy from the world about being invaded when you’re waving around a nuclear saber
You’ve fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this; never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line! Aha ha ha ha…
WMD! Get yo WMD here! WMD!
Do bzzt we bzzt have bzzt a bzzt problem bzzt here? ding
Why did you use this meme template and then make literally no reference to its conversation
OP right now
I was just a kid in the lead up to Iraq and I could see through the bullshit with this argument. If they had wmd we wouldn’t invade.
chemical weapons are easily countered at funding level that US army has
Completely false. UN weapons inspectors were allowed in Iraq unconditionally from September 2022 right up until the US went to war in March 2023. They found no evidence that Iraq had any stockpiles of WMD. That kinda rained on Bush’s parade though, so his administration simply ignored those findings.
You mean 2002 and 2003, right?
