>>11137
>President Bush used the same excuse to justify invading Iraq.
Saddam really gave that impression when his officials interfered with UN inspectors. And Hitchens sums this up nicely:
>The entire record of UNSCOM until that date had shown a determination on the part of the Iraqi dictatorship to build dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, to refuse to allow scientists to be interviewed without coercion, to conceal chemical and biological deposits, and to search the black market for material that would breach the sanctions. The defection of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, had shown that this policy was even more systematic than had even been suspected. Moreover, Iraq did not account for – has in fact never accounted for – a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD. Would it have been preferable to accept Saddam Hussein's word for it and to allow him the chance to re-equip once more once the sanctions had further decayed?
>Chomsky is right to be skeptical when governments claim the purpose of attacks are to disrupt WMD production.
You should be skeptical when anyone says anything especially those in power. This goes without saying, both Harris and Hitchens never show disagreement with this. They just take the time to think things through instead of going on the assumption that everything that those white men in government do is evil.
>There would be many reasons to attack a pharmaceutical factory if it were owned by an enemy of the state (Al Queda in this case).
In either case it impedes the enemy which in this case is a massive terrorist organization. They would've just said it was a key installation if that was the case. But this really does seem like a genuine blunder.
>True motives aren't necessarily published for public consumption.
Of course. And it is unfortunately so.
>Chomsky was born Jewish, but I son't think he is religious. He actually opposes Israel.
Sure, but he sucks Islamist dick day in and out.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/05/chomskys_follies.html
He's not a Jew but a Muslim sympathizer which as far as I'm concerned is a traitor to reason.
>Hitchens and Harris supported Bush, and they supported torture.
No actually, neither supported torture. Harris just thinks there might be a case where it is justifiable. That's hardly support.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/08/hitchens200808
https://web.archive.org/web/20150504005859/http://saiu.org/blog/greenwald-and-hussain-on-sam-harris-and-racism
And Harris didn't support the war.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/response-to-controversy
>I have never written or spoken in support of the war in Iraq. This has not stopped a “journalist” like Glenn Greenwald from castigating me as a warmonger (Which is especially rich, given that he supported the war. In fact, in 2005 he appeared less critical of U.S. foreign policy than I am.) The truth is, I have never known what to think about this war, apart from the obvious: 1) prospectively, it seemed like a very dangerous distraction from the ongoing war in Afghanistan; 2) retrospectively, it was a disaster. Much of the responsibility for this disaster falls on the Bush administration, and one of the administration’s great failings was to underestimate the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people. Whatever one may think about the rationale for invading Iraq and the prosecution of the war, there is nothing about the conflict that makes Islam look benign—not the reflexive solidarity expressed throughout the Muslim world for Saddam Hussein (merely because an army of “infidels” attacked him), not the endless supply of suicide bombers willing to kill Iraqi noncombatants, not the insurgency’s use of women and children as human shields, not the ritual slaughter of journalists and aid workers, not the steady influx of jihadis from neighboring countries, and not the current state of public opinion among European and American Muslims. It seems to me that no reasonable person can conclude that these phenomena are purely the result of U.S. foreign policy.