Why don't we have _any_ of these proofs of WMD?

[fhios]

The existence of WMD in Iraq would pretty much have to produce the following evidence:

1) Someone, at least one single individual out of several thousand. willing to admit to having been in a biochem warfare unit.

2) Someone in a conventional unit who went on manuvers with a unit rumored to be a biochem unit.

3) One or more units that stayed behind the conventional units and shadowed them, during either Gulf War, awaiting the order to deploy a war-crime.

4) Unambiguous evidence of deployment of same against or troops in this war.

We don't have any of these things!

[Hegel]

You know that could quite possibly be, that inspite of both the U.S. and the British governments assurances, there never were any weapons of mass destruction. Or they destroyed them all, like the previous Iraqi government said.

[fhios]

Originally posted by Hegel
You know that could quite possibly be, that inspite of both the U.S. and the British governments assurances, there never were any weapons of mass destruction. Or they destroyed them all, like the previous Iraqi government said.

I'm going with the "they never existed" theory (wasn't that clear?). To destroy all physical evidence of the things would've been hard enough, but they also would've had to kill everyone in the CBW units, any of their relatives, and the people who did all those killings. Is there anyone who sees this as possible?

[ImpyTimpy]

That is stretching it. What you'd really need is the material, not someone's word alone. In your scenarios, you'd also need to find the ready-to-deploy weapons, otherwise all you have is someone's word. They might as well claim they had super psychics performing death psi attacks on your troops and their credibility will be the same.

Originally posted by fhios
The existence of WMD in Iraq would pretty much have to produce the following evidence:

1) Someone, at least one single individual out of several thousand. willing to admit to having been in a biochem warfare unit.

2) Someone in a conventional unit who went on manuvers with a unit rumored to be a biochem unit.

3) One or more units that stayed behind the conventional units and shadowed them, during either Gulf War, awaiting the order to deploy a war-crime.

4) Unambiguous evidence of deployment of same against or troops in this war.

We don't have any of these things!

[fhios]

Originally posted by ImpyTimpy
That is stretching it. What you'd really need is the material, not someone's word alone. In your scenarios, you'd also need to find the ready-to-deploy weapons, otherwise all you have is someone's word. They might as well claim they had super psychics performing death psi attacks on your troops and their credibility will be the same.



My point is not on the acceptability of the evidence above, but on the absense of even such evidence as that listed above. If the government really wanted to convince us of its case--and if its case was provable--wouldn't it at least trot out stuff like the above to assure us as to the validity of its claims, or at least the likelihood of believing such things wrongly? Lastly, doesn't the absense of such evidence, each item being nearly inevitable given an Iraqi CBW program, prove the nonexistence of same to be the most reasonable view.