Redstate

Posted at 4:18pm on Apr. 13, 2008 On Doug Feith's "War and Decision"

By AcademicElephant

Promoted by Dan McLaughlin

[In the interests of full disclosure, Doug is a friend and I am biased in favor of him and of this book - AE.]

Doug Feith’s War and Decision came out on Tuesday. In my opinion, everyone who is interested in the greatest challenge to our country in a generation, the Global War on Terror, should read it.

War and Decision is the first book written by someone who was actually part of the decision-making process in the Pentagon on and after 9/11. Up till now, we have been reading largely second-hand accounts that report on events in which the authors were not directly involved and that are thus heavily reliant on selective sourcing. The result, as we all know, has not been pretty and the debate, particularly on Iraq, has disintegrated into finger pointing and hysteria.

Read On....

Posted in Afghanistan | Doug Feith | Iraq | War | War and Decision | WMD — Comments (41) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 3:14pm on Mar. 15, 2008 "If you had known then what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq?"

A little old news from Saddam's files

By AcademicElephant

A favorite question of Iraq war opponents is, "If you had known then what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq?" Given all the lies (WMD, links to terrorism) that dogged the lead up to the war, this question generally comes as a brilliant coup de grace in the argument that Iraq has been a brutal, expensive mistake that never should have happened in the first place.

And all too often those who support the war duck this question. The lame, default riposte is that everyone saw the same intelligence and anyway, the fact is that we're in Iraq it doesn't matter why we went--what matters now is winning.

Of course, winning matters very much. But for that victory to be meaningful, I think we need to remember, not avoid, the reasons we went to war in the first place. They may not be as spurious or flawed as many think.

I propose that the answer to "If you had know then what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq?" should be "Yes, and here's why."

Read on...

Posted in Archived | debate over the war | greeted with flowers | Saddam and al Qaeda | WMD — Comments (116)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 3:37am on Jan. 25, 2008 Iraq WMDs: Worst Marketing Campaign Strategy In Modern History

By haystack

From my AYFKM files (don't ask if you don't already know):

Every now and again, you come across a news story intended to say one thing...but it winds up hitting you upside the head with something altogether different. With so much going on around here, it's no surprise there's not more being said about THIS story, but I just can NOT let this one go by without some response:

Posted in AYFKM? | Iraq | Miscellanea | Saddam | WMD — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 11:19am on Dec. 11, 2007 Some Further Thoughts on the Iran NIE

By Dan McLaughlin

A few thoughts on last week's announcement of the National Intelligence Estimate, which estimates that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons program in 2003:

1. As Reagan used to say, trust, but verify. U.S. intelligence has historically been lousy regarding other nations' WMD programs, especially police states, going back as far as the USSR and Red China getting The Bomb. The errors haven't even all been in one direction: threats have been underestimated at least as often as overestimated. And if the post-9/11 bureaucratic imperative was to avoid charges of failing to 'connect the dots,' the post-Iraq War imperative is to avoid charges of overestimating WMD threats. So this may well be yet another case of fighting the last war. Taranto's column last Wednesday collected some good analyses, of which there are many more. At a minimum, the NIE should not be taken at face value as holy writ. There's a reason they call these things "estimates."

Posted in Alan Dershowitz | Iran | Iraq | National Security | NIE | WMD — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 12:24am on Apr. 19, 2007 Somebody here been talking about nitric acid lately?

Because we just found a *LOT*

By Jeff Emanuel

According to the AP:

U.S. forces seized 3,000 gallons of nitric acid in a weapons cache hidden in a warehouse in eastern Baghdad, the military said Wednesday.

The discovery was made last Thursday during a routine cordon and search operation, the U.S. military said in a statement. Troops had been searching for suspects accused of planting car bombs in the area, it said.

[...]

Three Iraqi suspects were detained in the operation, and other confiscated items included mobile phones, vehicle license plates, identification cards, batteries and ammunition, the statement said.

3,000 gallons? Now that's an awful lot of chemicals being used to make explosives. Just don't refer to the final product as a "chemical explosive" (unless you have the time and energy to define and explain WMD, "chemical weapons," and "dual use" - which, at this moment, I do not).

Posted in War | WMD — Comments (32)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 10:10pm on Apr. 17, 2007 More chemical weapons in Iraq, part II

This time its in an attempted truck bomb

By Jeff Emanuel

Update:

Initially, military officials said the dump truck was laden with explosives and containers of nitric acid — an apparent attempt at crude chemical warfare on the part of insurgent bombers.

But later, on Tuesday, officials said that the containers held fuel, not acid.

“The containers were consistent with those normally used to transport nitric acid, but upon examination, they were found to be filled with gasoline,” a military statement read.

An attempt to explode a truck carrying nitric acid at a military checkpoint in Iraq failed yesterday because the vehicle overturned before reaching its target, Reuters reported via the LA Times.

A truck laden with nitric acid and explosives overturned before the driver could attack a joint security station operated by U.S. and Iraqi troops north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said today.

The use of nitric acid in bomb attacks could mark another shift in tactics by insurgents, who in recent months have rigged nearly a dozen truck bombs with chlorine gas, mainly in Al Anbar province.

In a statement, the U.S. military said a security patrol went to assist the driver of the truck after it overturned and found it loaded with eight containers of nitric acid and explosives.

It said the driver said he had been paid to attack the security station in Mushada.

According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, "the possible use of nitric acid as a chemical supplement to conventional bombings" - a tactic which "mirrors recent bombings in which tanks of chlorines have been loaded on to car bombs" - emerged last week with the discovery, covered here at RS, of 33 barrels of the material at a pair of Baghdad houses.

Posted in chemical weapons | Iraq | War | WMD — Comments (44)/ Email this page » / Read More »