• PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    There was never any good evidence, it was always “trust the CIA!”

    Well, if you put it that way… no.

    Iraq is nowhere near Afghanistan either. And the US has international weapons inspectors in Iraq annually after the first war. They posed no threat to us… we still had a frickin no fly zone over half the damned country, what were they going to do?

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_no-fly_zones_conflict

    Fascinating history, but the war against Iraq never really ended. We were constantly bombing Iraq on the daily 1999 through 2003.

    • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      David Kelly, British weapons inspector who lead multiple UN missions to inspect Iraqi facilities (and deal with their bullshit) first hand…

      • didn’t believe their mobilisation was advanced
      • thought many of the exaggerations the US and UK came up with were utter bullshit
      • didn’t believe there was any Al-Qaeda connection
      • didn’t believe chem weapons could be fired in 45 minutes

      But DID

      • state the “concealed” Iraqii chemical weapons program was real
      • said “8,500 litres of anthrax VX, 2,160 kilograms of bacterial growth media, 360 tonnes of bulk chemical warfare agent, 6,500 chemical bombs and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents remained unaccounted for”
      • believed Saddam was committed to deception around the program and had provably recovered chemical weapons equipment from decommission sites after inspectors had left
      • stated Saddam’s use of chemical weapons was inevitable
      • stated only regime change could stop it

      And this is the guy conspiracy theorists think got assassinated because he was too opposed to the governments. Even he argued that what he’d seen showed Saddam should be forcably toppled…