Did Saddam Give Syria or Iran His Chemical Weapons?

The short answer is "no."

**Why wouldn't he?**

The short answer is that Syria and Iran were allied against Saddam. That is why the U.S. made friends with Saddam in the first place. He hated those pricks even more than we did.

**What’s the long answer?**

Now we’re talking! The long answer can be divided into parts.

1) Like I said, Saddam hated those countries and they hated him. Saddam and the Ayatollah fought for 8 years, with Iran receiving support from the Asaad family. The war had over 1.25 million casualties. We backed Iraq in that war. A few years later, Syrians backed the U.S. in a war against Iraq. The one consistent factor in this seeming hypocrisy is that Saddam hated and feared Asaad and the Ayatollah, and would until his dying day. In fact, Saddam admitted after his defeat that the reason he boasted about having WMDs was to keep Iran and its closest ally at bay.

2) Saddam had nothing to gain by giving away his chemical stockpile in the run-up to the Iraq War. You have to consider the timing of his options. If he had given up the stockpile before the Americans decided to invade, he would have been giving them to his blood-nemeses before he even knew he needed to. If the Americans didn’t come, it would have been inevitable suicide for no gain. If, however, he had given up his stockpile after the Americans were coming, it would still not have saved him. Remember, once the U.S. decided to invade, we told Saddam that the only thing that would stop us was if he surrendered, stepped down from office and turned himself over to stand trial by Iraqi citizens. In other words, he was going to be executed whether he had chemical weapons or not. In fact, that is exactly what happened: we never found chemical weapons, but that didn’t save him from the hangman’s noose. I saw it on video. Keep that in mind: people who ask you to believe that Saddam gave his chemical weapons to Syria or Iran are asking you to believe that he did so for nothing.

3) Neither Syria nor Iran wanted Saddam’s chemical weapons for one reason: if giving over his chemical weapons could have saved Saddam’s life, neither Assad nor the Ayatollah would have taken them. They had wanted him dead for decades Now there we were offering to do it for them and all they had to do was not get involved.

4) Neither Syria nor Iran wanted Saddam’s chemical weapons for another reason. The most powerful military in the world was already waging one open-ended war in their region and we were shouting to the world that we wanted another. Why? Chemical weapons! By the end of that year, even the craziest of the crazy Middle Eastern dictators, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, made a surprise announcement that he would end his WMD program and destroy his chemical stockpiles. That is how little the countries of the Middle East wanted to wind up next on our crusading shit list. Considering our level of surveillance on Iraq as we were gearing up for war, it strains the imagination to imagine either country would risk being caught accepting chemical weapons (which they were already developing on their own) from America’s no. 1 enemy, a sure-fire way to turn a WIN-WIN into a total LOSS.

**That was long. Can you recap that?**

Some of the last bits were educated guesses, but look at it this way:

People who expect you to believe that Saddam gave his chemical stockpile to Syria or Iran during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, expect you to believe that he gave his most powerful weapons to sworn enemies for no advantage without us noticing at a time when they were least likely to accept. They expect you to believe that without a shred of proof. Think about that for a second.

**Why do people think he did?**

Good question. During the latter days of the Iraq-Iran War, Iraq received both consent from the CIA and direct assistance from the Reagan Administration (changing their State classification to allow U.S. companies to sell them chemical reagents) to use chemical weapons against Iran. The reasoning was strategic: Iran had lesser arms but more “soldiers” and had been gaining ground by overwhelming Iraqi troops with bodies. Chemical weapons could take out scores of them easily. It worked, killing thousands of Iranian soldiers and Kurdish guerillas, as well as Iraqi civilians. The last known attack of this nature occurred in 1988. When the “Coalition of the Willing” toppled Saddam’s regime in 2003, the weapons, the primary justification for war, were nowhere to be found.

**What happened to them?**

Much of it, if not all, was destroyed during and after the Gulf War. A combination of American forces, U.N. weapons inspectors and Israeli bombers took care of everything we knew about. We then left a vast surveillance infrastructure in place to make sure anything we didn’t know about never turned up. It is possible that given the decade between the two Iraq Wars, that chemical weapon technology could have been sold in small amounts over time through the black market (likely to North Korea, if anyone), but that is not plausible as a last-minute measure. There is, therefore, no reason to assume that he still had the weapons when the U.S. accused him of having them in 2003.

**Conclusion?**

Anyone who believes Saddam gave his chemical stockpile away right before the U.S. got there has a lot of big questions to answer and contradictions to clear up and no evidence to help them out along the way. The Bush administration tried very hard and came up empty handed.

FROM THE BOARDS: A SUMMARY of the IRS SCANDAL

Generally speaking, I have stopped blogging and radically increased the amount of time I spend on political message boards. Here's an example--I posted this a few days ago after several references to the IRS scandal.

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The 2013 IRS Scandal: Who's Guilty of What Now?

Let me begin by assuring you that I do not wish to downplay the significant of what actually happened. The IRS under the Obama administration instituted a procedure of de facto discrimination against organization from an emerging far-right movement. That happened. However, as you have all heard me say before, context matters. There is a need, at least on this board, to begin to to separate the reality of the 2013 IRS Scandal from the mythology of the 2013 IRS Scandal.

I am very sorry to your attention-spans, but to do that, I'm going to have to start from the beginning.

[In The Beginning... 501]

Not so well hidden within the infinite bookshelf that holds the federal tax laws of the United States is a troublesome provision—Section 501 (c)(4), a hive of scum and villainy—that exempts non-profits working “exclusively for the promotion of social welfare” from paying income tax. It is essentially an incentive codified into law for us to create organizations for not personal gain, but for the good of the people. It is actually a perfectly reasonable and well-intended provision with just one unforeseeable catch: no two of the people in this country can seem to agree what’s good for them. To bridge that gap, we invented the forum politic.

Access to “the people” in the U.S. sometimes requires at least some interaction with the people’s noble stewards, politicians. All sarcasm aside, this is a feature of democracy, not a bug. Most anyone running any significant, charitable non-profit will occasionally have to contact a politician to ask for help, make suggestions, or raise and collect money. Collectively, we call these interactions “lobbying” and “campaign activities.” Section 501 (c)(4) was never intended for use by political organizations, but insofar as all organizations are political to some small extent, exceptions are generally made provided such political interactions are not the organization's primary operation.

This allowed these social welfare groups to participate in the political process with under a number of conditions. That is, until 2010. In 2010, Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission ruled unconstitutional many of the restrictions of U.S. campaign finance, officially allowing any organization not directly affiliated with a political campaign to spend unlimited amounts of anonymous money to influence elections.

[Until the Game Changes]

The Citizens United decision was in January 2010, a year for midterm elections. Leaders of the still-politically-hypothetical Tea Party were the first to adapt to the suddenly lax and vaguely undefined campaign finance laws by starting Political Action Committees under the banners of their 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups. Over $100 million of tax-free, “social welfare” money was spent on elections that year—twice as much as the previous midterm. The Tea Party, an ostensibly populist movement, rolled into office for the first time on a wave of corporate money. And that was just the beginning.

Conservatives argued that union spending for liberals provides a counterbalance to corporate spending for Republicans. The unions were outspent 10-to-1 in that midterm.

Republicans were pleased. Democrats were not. Democrats did not think it was fair that organizations who benefit from a tax exemption for working “exclusively to promote social welfare” for whom politics is not the “primary operation” could not raise and spend several times more money on politics than everything else they do combined. Senate Democrats asked the IRS to investigate the behavior of 501(c)(4) groups to see if they weren’t just offshoots of political parties and campaigns. The IRS upper-management did not. They asked the IRS to clearly define how much political activity a group can participate in before they have to consider it their primary operation for tax reasons. The IRS upper-management did not.

The IRS upper-management did nothing. The IRS figured that looking into the ways groups raised and spent money to assure compliance with tax law—in other words, the job of the IRS—was too politically-charged to undertake when the FEC had just suffered such a big blow. And besides, the IRS was shrinking. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of applications for 501(c)(4) status doubled, while the IRS suffered Republican-led budget cuts that left, by their own admission, unable to adequately preform its duties.

[Pay Attention Because This Is the Part You Care About]

What we know for a fact is this: in March 2010, one branch of one division of the IRS, inundated by a surge of new 501(c)(4) requests (mostly from conservative groups) resulting from the Citizens United decision and on the verge of the most expensive mid-term election in history, made a very, very bad decision. This branch instituted a system by which agents (and their computers) could single-out suspicious groups by certain words commonly used by offenders: the so-called “Be On the Look Out List.” In short, they had created a system for profiling. The “Be On the Look Out” terms leaned heavily on traditionally conservative talking points and slogans and quickly became popular with other branches.

There is an important thing to note here, which is that the IRS receives 10,000s of tax-exemption applications a year, most of which are NOT just fronts for unlimited, anonymous, political soft-money. Most of them are for people raising money to fix up parks, provide after-school care for kids in bad neighborhoods or teach old veterans how to read or something adorable like that. Some of them just want to cure cancer. The ones that want something else—the ones that are obviously political—tend to be started by a lot of the same people having the same talks at conventions and, yes, tend to use the same language. Categorically flagging applicants based on similar criteria has always been IRS policy. The problem with profiling is that it’s wrong, not that it’s stupid.

Now the numbers here get a little fuzzy, but this is the heart of the controversy: over a two-year span, it became impossible to get 501(c)(4) status if your name included “Tea Party” (although why you would name yourself after a political movement and hope to be considered non-political confuses me) “patriot” or “9/12.” No one was denied, but only 4 were approved while the rest waited in bureaucratic limbo. One liberal group actually was denied, and many were put in the same limbo, but many more were approved during the same time period. Many conservative groups without those three flagged phrases were scrutinized but approved during this time as well.

That’s it. That’s the scandal. There is a lot of context and context matters, but the fact is that there was a span of 2 years in which it was apparently harder to get certified under a certain tax exemption for conservatives than liberals.

It's worth noting that you don't actually need to be certified 501(c)(4) to file as such, but it helps fund-raising if you can show the certification in advance.

Well, okay.... it gets a little sketchier. What happens after you are selected for further scrutiny, and what people in the media aren’t talking about enough, is that the IRS starts asking you questions… Weird questions. Some people got asked if they’d done any business with the Koch brothers. Some got asked what kind of books their kids read. One Republican congressman thought the IRS asked the contents of members’ prayers; that turned out to be untrue, but not before it spreads throughout the conservative press. Some of the questions, actually, were fairly routine, but by then it didn’t matter--the scandal was in full-swing and misinformation is as good as any if you trust no one.

[And Then...]

The IRS covered their asses immediately and poorly. Lois Lerner was the first to fess up, but was also caught lying and resigned. Higher-ups Joseph Grant and Steven Miller also resigned. Miller basically ran the place. The Treasury Dept. Inspector General conducted an investigation that pointed to serious problem within the culture of the IRS—generally speaking, insolence and ineptitude at lower and middle-management levels. The House conducted an investigation looking specifically for a link to the White House and found… nothing. The actions of this limited branch of the IRS was condemned by President Obama, virtually every U.S. Congressman on either party, and the matter was more or less put to bed.

Like I said, this actually happened. A real problem emerged, a bunch of people tried to lie their ways out of it. People got fired but probably not enough, a system that has gone without oversight for several administrations finally got some light shined on it, and we move on to newer news. It's not a good day for America, but it isn't exactly Hoover's FBI either.

[So Now What?]

To this day, conservatives from the far right of the mainstream cite the IRS Scandal as evidence that the administration (whose criminality is already presupposed), will stop at nothing to silence its critics. There are just a few problems with this representation: 1) the IRS didn't stop at nothing, they just caused a delay in the certification of an optional tax status that most of these groups arguably don't deserve 2) there is only circumstantial evidence that the motivation was ever political and systematic (let's screw over conservatives) as opposed to misguided and systemic (see the definition of "sampling error"?) and 3) no one found any link to the White House.

Now I know better than to think I can convince anyone who already dislikes the president or the government in general that every single scandal out there is not only true, but obvious. However, the only thing I can say for sure is that the Obama administration should have seen this coming at least by 2012 and called themselves out on it. Of course, that was an election year.

BOY, 10, FIGHTS OFF INTRUDERS, GUN LOGIC

This story about a 10 year-old Brooklyn boy who defended his home from invaders has been making the rounds in conservative circles today. Despite coming from the New York Post, this is a real story*:

The brave boy escaped to his bedroom after the two men, posing as FedEx deliverymen, entered his family’s Canarsie home at 5:30 p.m. and ordered two teens to stay in the living room while they searched the house.

 One of the men tried to reach into the boy’s bedroom with the gun in his hand — and the quick-thinking youngster slammed the door on him so hard, he dropped the weapon.

The boy picked up the gun and fired off a shot. The robbers then fled

The pro-gun groups are crazy about this story. I just can't figure out why--the gun-owner of this story had his firearm used against him by a child.

Yes, I mean the criminal--this is not to say that I have many sympathies towards him. But not only was his gun easily stolen, it was easily stolen by a 10 year-old. Had he brought a knife instead, he and his partner probably would have succeeded. He brought a gun instead and essentially lost a fight to an unarmed boy.

That's not a good look, promoters of gun-safety.

 Now, the well-tread narrative from pro-gun people is always, "if you make guns illegal, only criminals will have guns." But in this case, only criminals DID have a guns and it all worked out rather nicely.

But what really turns me all around is that many of the same people who point to the gun as the reason this story has a happy ending are the one who will point anywhere else when a story has an unhappy ending. The message, "guns don't kill people; people kill people" doesn't seem to apply when the gun is in the hands of an innocent victim. At the moment of reflection, I suppose we are to commend the gun for bravely leaping from the hands of the merciless thug and into those of the little boy, aiming and firing itself until the situation was safely resolved. It seems that guns (like Reagan or God) are only responsible for the good things that happen in their name.

Of course, I'm not saying this is an anti-gun story either. Acquiring a gun did save the day. It just didn't happen in a way the pro-gun orthodoxy should jump to celebrate.







* different sources differ on different details

INSIDE THE MODERN AMERICAN REVOLUTION (Facebook group)

As of this moment, The Modern American Revolution Facebookgroup is boasts 9,809 members (the 10,000th gets a free tee!) and the slogan, “The answer to 1984 is 1776.”

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE INSANE

It is not easy, at first glance, to tell exactly what kind of group the MAR really is. I looked into the group with a particular stereotype in mind: I was looking for a sort of republican jihad, energized gun-nuts, freedom-fetishists of the sort who often speak for the Tea Party, and an undercurrent of closeted racism and xenophobia. In fact, I was surprised by how agreeable I found large chunks of the MAR’s stated agenda. In its rambling description, the MAR includes a litany of specific and not-so-specific goals for American government.

From the outset, the MAR does not resemble a typical right-wing organization. From my liberal position, it is as though this list is the result of a collaboration of three different authors: the good (“End Corporate Personhood,” “Stop Polluting the Air, Water & Food”), the bad (“Restore and Empower States Rights,” “Fair Taxes for Everyone”) and the insane, which seeks the conversion of “All Military Bases around the World into Orchards and Vineyards” among other uncommon and unlikely ideas.

ABOUT TIME

Is a MAR a gathering place for the good, the bad, or the insane? The question is easier to answer after a week or so following the group’s posts on my newsfeed. Regardless of the group's intentions, they attract from the fringe. One post time-stamped “about an hour ago” shared a news-stylearticle about the impending March 11th impeachment of PresidentObama. Immediately dozens (by now, hundreds) of followers started singing their hallelujahs. It made no difference that there is no impending March 11^th impeachment of the president—the article is a hoax—since fewer than 1 in 10 commenter seemed to be aware of it. One after another, the gallery chimed in: "ABOUT TIME!"

The article was not just a hoax, but an obvious one: it referenced the upcoming 2012 election (from over 3 months ago); made no direct attributions (“sources close to congressional aides say…”); contains no bylines, publication names or dates; and appeared to be the only source on the entire Internet for what, if true, would instantly become a top news story around the world.

More than those aspects of the sham that require basic critical-thinking to unravel, what sets this story farthest apart is that it just doesn’t sound true, does it? I make the mistake of assuming that if one cares enough about politics to want the president impeached, one must know enough to suspect that it isn’t likely. Even if you try to ignore politics, the news should surprise you. Surely there would have been warning signs. Surely there would have been a great uproar. Surely, like Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski, you could not have avoided hearing about it if you tried.

This was not the first piece of bad intel propagated by the group—the MAR is, I suspect, naïve to the realities behind many of the materials they share. Last week I corrected a pie chart that showed over 50% ofPres. Obama’s proposed FY2013 budget is military spending. It should seem obvious that the government does not spend half of its entire budget on the military, but there you have it. Not a single person doubted it before I told them, and I'm not sure many doubt it now.

How could it be that a group of people so vehemently skeptical about, among other matters, Obama’s nationality and religion, 9/11, and the press—they praise themselves as more “awake” than the rest of the country—could also be so vulnerable to misinformation? 

SHADOWS ON THE WALL OF AN ECHO CHAMBER (and other mixed-metaphors)

The explanation, I think, is that many of the group's members are not skeptical with their minds; they are skeptical with their hearts. When an event occurs that they do not personally like, they get the “impression” that something about it must be objectively wrong. They listen to supporters of the “bad thing” and they make note of inconsistencies, details they believe they are not told and things they just don’t understand. Then they look to others to confirm their version of reality. This is a politic of mass delusion in which we all participate, to a certain extent. We saw it in a small way on election night, as half the country was, despite a consensus among the national polls, shocked when Pres. Obama handily won.

The reason so many admirers of groups like the Modern American Revolution are so quick to believe that impeachment is right around the corner is because they HEAR the uproar from  one another, they SEE the warning signs at the tips of each other’s’ fingers, and they have the impression that they, their friends, their neighbors and their websites are part of a large movement. The ugly truth is that their movement is probably as fictitious as their propaganda. While there are legitimate criticisms of Pres. Obama’s performance in office and there are legitimate normative reasons to oppose any of his policies, the vast majority of Americans have no particular revolutionary fervor. In fact, Obama won our popularity contest twice!

A GREATER TRUTH

Since the end of the first American revolution, there have always been groups on the society's fringe calling for another (the one time they tried, it didn't end so well). Much like religious zealots who, century after century, believe that they are chosen to live in the End Times, the modern, right-wing revolutionary couches his struggle with the government in the rhetoric of an idealized past and an almost cosmic war of good vs. evil, freedom vs. tyranny, and us vs. them with no middle ground.


Q'S FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY A

1.       Assuming anything but the removal of its current leaders from power, what is the minimum you would accept in a negotiation with the federal government to avoid rebellion?

2.       Do you consider yourself more gullible about anti-Obama information than pro-Obama information? If so, does that bother you?

3.       Is an armed revolution something that can be militarily won? Will conventional arms allow you to resist a true, government crackdown in this day and age?

4.       The year in 2017: the end of the 2^nd American Revolution. The tyrant has hanged, his government collapsed. True patriots thank one another and go home for a good night’s sleep and 4.5 minutes of solid missionary-style. What do you do tomorrow? What does the new America look like, who runs it, and how many of us are left? Does this matter, or is the rebellion its own point?

U.N. Dissability Treaty - How We Embarrassed Ourselves Today

For better or worse, I have a stomach for politics that makes me a man apart (usually from friends, from family, from anyone who wants the news turned off). Even so, the nation's leaders leave me reliably irritated, enraged, and discouraged and disappointed. This morning, I feel something completely unexpected: I feel embarrassed.

Yesterday, the United States Senate failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities treaty. The U.N. treaty to ensure the full enjoyment of human rights by disabled people abroad was adopted in 2006 and based on groundbreaking U.S law. It has enjoyed widespread international (126 nations have already ratified) and bipartisan support, including the endorsements of Fmr. Pres. George W. Bush, Pres. Barack Obama, Sen. John McCain and Sen. John Kerry.

The constitution requires a two-thirds Senate majority for the ratification of treaties. We failed the world by 5 votes.

8 GOP Senators voted with the Democrats for ratification. The rest cited concerns about American sovereignty. 

To be clear: The world came to us, told us they love what we are already doing and that they want to do it that way too. That's it.

Ratification would not change our laws, but would send a message to the world that the U.S. still proudly accepts the responsibility of leadership--that we don't just look overseas to kill our enemies but to stand with our friends. It should have been a no-brainier.

This is actually embarrassing. We should feel embarrassed. Republican Senators should feel personally embarrassed.

ROUND-UP: STORIES I MISSED

I only blog so often. Once a week, or so, a story holds enough of my attention to warrant the full treatment. But the news that I write about is an imperceptible fraction of the news that I consume. Naturally, I assume that you care just enough about politics to sound like you know what you're talking about at parties. So read on; get conversational on a few topics that can be difficult to follow in depth while I brush up on stories that have made it on my radar, but not onto the page.

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Israel v. Palestine

After a year spent rattling sabers at the Iranians, I must admit that it was with some small amount of inappropriate relief that violence escalated once again with Palestine. For all the troubles of this, the world's most intractable and hope-dashing conflict, at least Palestine is a predictable enemy. Israel v. Palestine does not involve sleeper cells on American soil, does not threaten the world's oil market, and does not require the direct involvement of the U.S. military.

As I followed the news, I was reminded of the real problem: the Palestine fight didn't just come back; it never went away. The last major fighting between these two peoples ended in early 2009. Since then, Israel reports 2,500 rocket attacks from Gaza militants. 2,500 during a time of what passes for relative peace. Israel's official response came sharply on November 14, with an airstrike that killed Hammas military chief Ahmed Jabari. American press took notice again. Both sides believe that were they to put down their guns, they would soon cease to exist. Both sides have a point.

Two developments this week:

First, the U.N. voted for the first time to officially recognize Palestine as a "non-member observer state" instead of a "non-member observer entity." The vote is purely symbolic, but at an alarming 138-to-9 count, has the added effect of distancing the world from the U.S. on the issue of Palestinian statehood and unilateral Israel support.

Second, a reminder that while the arrow of progress may always move forward, it does so slowly through a barricade of human shit. Today, Israel approved the construction of 3,000 new homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem--an act which violates the only real Palestinian condition for peace talks.

Meet Egypt’s New Boss—Same as the Old Boss?

We in the U.S. were very encouraged by the 2011 Egyptian revolution--so much so that we didn't mind so much that the ousted dictator was our friend and his replacement was not. If ever there was a moment for that new-democratically-elected-leader smell to wear off, it was last Tuesday, when the unpredictable Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi generously granted himself broad, unchecked new powers.

The sad truth is that this may be as bad as it looks, but context still matters. As Huff Po's Neil Hicks writes, a lot of former-dictator Hosni Mubarak power structure is still in place (particularly in the military), and the judiciary isn't nearly as insulated from the nascent and volatile political process as you'd want. Morsi has a constitution to draft and faces obstruction at every turn.

The goals of his power-grab are unsurprising: Morsi needs the power to overrule the judiciary, draft the constitution he wants, and strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood. Equally unsuprising, the public reaction--and so, once again, thousands of protesters fill Cairo's now-famed Tahrir Square.

Obama's New Strategy

Republican operatives leaked Obama’s first proposal to avoid the “fiscal cliff” (a foretold economic disaster resulting from the simultaneous expiration of the Bush tax cuts, a decision on the debt ceiling, and the massive and varied sequestration spending cuts). The notable thing about this proposal is that it’s essentially the same thing Obama offered in his budget. Republicans are angry—for four years they have gotten used to a democratic President who offers them most of what they want, then asking for more. As Ezra Klein writes, the president seems fed up with hopingthat Republicans and the media will appreciate his moderation and, essentially, “negotiatingwith himself.”

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That doesn't do it for the week. It is easy after reading a brief news story to think that you know it all, that the affairs for the world are so big, brush your hands and say "that's just that, end of story." I assure you, that is almost never case. I encourage you to read more, poke around the Sunday papers and reputable news sites, go to your local library and borrow an actual book. For everyone else, the story will end; yours will be just beginning.