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jimrandomh comments on Vote Qualifications, Not Issues - Less Wrong
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If a policy question is a question of fact, it never becomes a talking point; it's just silently resolved and forgotten. I think questions of this sort greatly outnumber the controversial ones that dominate the discourse.
So, if I understand you, questions like abortion, drug laws, and gay marriage are controversial questions of values and dominate political debate, but are really unimportant. But issues like gun control are questions of fact. So, we should choose politicians who pledge to listen to the experts on this kind of question?
I can understand the desire for an appeal to technocracy on technical questions, but I recall the last time I decided to simply trust the people with the best information rather than trusting my own instincts. It was on the existence of a WMD threat in Iraq.
To be honest, I have to consider myself better as a judge of technical issues like AGW, taxation, and military spending than as a judge of the intelligence, integrity, and rationality of politicians.
There were WMD in Iraq; we've found them. It's just that it was never really reported on due to the overall left-wing bias in the entertainment and media industries, and due to the fact that the vast majority of them were sent to Syria to be hidden before the war started, and therefore there was a fairly long period where we couldn't find any.
Assertions like this need hyperlinks.
It's old news; from Google I find the following on the first page for "Saddam syria wmd": http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=25309 http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/2/18/233023.shtml http://www.nysun.com/foreign/saddams-wmd-moved-to-syria-an-israeli-says/24480/ http://hotair.com/archives/2010/06/05/obama-dni-choice-believes-syrians-have-saddams-wmd/ Et cetera. There was apparently a report saying that they weren't (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042501554.html), but there's still obviously a good chunk of high-up people who disagree.
As for us finding WMD, we found about 500 in the three years between the invasion in 2003 and this statement in 2006: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=15918
The existence of articles on Google which contain the keywords "Saddam syria wmd" isn't enough to establish that Saddam gave all his WMD to Syria.
The articles you Googled are from WorldNetDaily (a news source with a "US conservative perspective"), a New York tabloid, a news aggregator, and a right wing blog. Of course, it would be wrong to dismiss them based on my assumptions about the possible bias of the sources, but on reading them they don't provide much evidence for what you are asserting.
The first three state that various people (a Syrian defector, some US military officials and an Israeli general) claim that it happened (based on ambiguous evidence including sightings of convoys going into Syria). It's not hard to see that a defector and a general from a country that was about to attack the Syrian nuclear programme might have been strongly motivated to make Syria look bad.
The Hot Air article (the only one published after 2006) quotes a Washington Times reporter quoting a 2004 Washington Times interview with a general saying that Iraq dispersed "documentation and materials". It then concludes this must refer to WMD, although it could refer to research programmes rather than viable weapons.
You then link to a report that actual WMD investigators hadn't found any evidence that it happened, but say that "obviously a good chunk of high-up people ... disagree". I don't think you've provided evidence that it's a "good chunk" of people, and even if it did, their disagreement might be feigned or mistaken. Even the high-up people who authorised the war and were embarrassed by the lack of WMD haven't cited the Syria explanation.
The last link says that US found 500 degraded chemical artillery shells from the 1980s which were too corroded to be used but might still have some toxicity. They don't sound like something that could actually be used to cause mass destruction.
So, even based on the evidence you present, it's not a very convincing case. That's without bringing any consideration of whether the rest of the known facts are consistent with the assertions. Why would Saddam Hussein, a megalomaniacal dictator, be more concerned about hiding his WMD than his own personal survival? Why would he plan to hide the WMD rather than using them to fight a superior army? Presumably to embarrass the US from beyond the grave? There is also primary evidence that Saddam announced to his generals early in the war that he didn't have any WMD, although most of them assumed he did and were amazed (see the book Cobra II http://www.amazon.com/Cobra-II-Inside-Invasion-Occupation/dp/0375422625 ). And why didn't the Syrians provide WMD back to the insurgents (many of whom were initially Ba'athists from the old regime) once the occupation phase began?
I'm not writing this with much hope of changing your mind - I just don't want anyone else to have to waste time assessing the quality of the evidence you present. I also think it's ironic that you have written the above comment on a rationality site.
"The last link says that US found 500 degraded chemical artillery shells from the 1980s which were too corroded to be used but might still have some toxicity. They don't sound like something that could actually be used to cause mass destruction."
So just because it doesn't seem to cause mass destruction according to you, it therefore ISN'T a WMD?
WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction. According to the US government and international law, WMD (mosly) means: "nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons." That's it. This weapon is classified as a chemical weapon under the Chemical Weapons Convention, so by that definition, Saddam had WMDs.
Source: http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f1a1.html
EDIT: Though for the most part, I was called to attention that "WMDs" may have no definiton at all, and instead people use the words NCB instead, for clarification . Also, the source points out that there are new types of WMDs such as conventional weapons and radiological weapons.
Which really has absolutely nothing to do with my original implicit complaint, which was that my national leaders misled me.
They didn't say "We need to invade Iraq because the Iraqis have not properly decommissioned tactical chemical weapons left over from the War with Iran. It is our duty to the environmental safety of the Iraqi public to go in there and make sure that those corroding artillery shells are safely destroyed."
I thought it was that they didn't have better information than you after all.
In which case I was going to ask whether you really thought your own instincts could do systematically better on such questions than intelligence agencies.
But now it appears you believe they did have better information, but were dishonest in their reporting. If I may ask, how carefully have you considered the hypothesis that they were honestly mistaken, and that your instincts just happened to be correct in this case, more or less by accident? (Many people were skeptical simply because they didn't like the party in power at the time, which seems dubious as a general recipe for accurately judging, well, anything, but especially questions of foreign intelligence.)
Good questions. I'll try to answer thoughtfully and honestly.
No, I don't think my instincts would do better than the professionals; I'm just disappointed that the professionals seem not to have based their judgments on evidence, but rather on instincts only slightly more well informed than my own.
Do I believe they might have been mistaken rather than dishonest? Well, I quite confidently assume that some were mistaken and some were dishonest. The aspect of the situation which leaves me feeling betrayed is that I voted for Bush in 2000, in part because I was intrigued by his "branding" as "the MBA president". I expected a manager type to be better at picking staff and at insuring that the numbers get crunched (and get crunched honestly) than brilliant/intuitive types like Bill Clinton. Boy, was I wrong.
In 2004, I held my nose and voted for Kerry. I lost. By 2008, I was so disgusted with the Republicans that I voted against McCain, a man I had always liked. I can't say that I am happy with the result. The Republican party has now turned completely foul, and to make it worse, looks like it will win big with this new look. Obama, who gave me a lot of hope, has now disappointed me almost as much as Bush did.
Yeah, I know I am sliding into Mind Killer territory here. Sorry. Back to your question: dishonest or mistaken? I think a lot of intelligence people were mistaken. I think Cheney, Rumsfeld, and his neocon staff were dishonest. I think Powell was privately honest but publicly dishonest, because he thought it was his job. I think Bush is so completely Meyers-Briggs NF and so completely not ST, that he probably genuinely doesn't understand how an honest person like himself could possibly be mistaken.
Just recently, a piece of evidence has come to light which makes it very hard to believe that the motivation for the war was an honest fear of WMDs.
Rumsfeld wrote talking points for a November 2001 meeting with Tommy Franks containing the section:
"How start? * Saddam moves against Kurds in north? * US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attacks or to anthrax attacks? * Dispute over WMD inspections? * Start now thinking about inspection demands."
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/index.htm
In the context of a meeting about planning an invasion of Iraq, it's hard to interpret this as anything but a list of potential excuses to start the war. It's not "we must invade if we find Iraq helped with terrorism", but "a link between Iraq and terrorism is one way to start the war".
In particular, the last item suggests that the US was willing to use the inspection process to cause conflict with the Iraqis, rather than to determine if they had WMD. If his sole motive was stopping the Iraqis having WMD, his decision process would have been "If the Iraqis don't cooperate with the inspectors, then we invade". Instead it seems more like "a dispute about the inspections is another possible way to start the war". Of course, in practice, the inspections did go ahead, but the US invaded anyway.
This is why you should vote issues and not qualifications. Rumsfeld was a very good administrator and good at making the army do things his way - the problem was he seems to have valued invading Iraq as an end in itself.
Before I reply, let's just look at the phrase "WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction" and think for a while. Maybe we should taboo the phrase "WMD".
Was it supposed to be bad for Saddam to have certain objects merely because they were regulated under the Chemical Weapons Convention, or because of their actual potential for harm?
The justification for the war was that Iraq could give dangerous things to terrorists. Or possibly fire them into Israel. It was the actual potential for harm that was the problem.
Rusty shells with traces of sarin degradation products on them might legally be regulated as chemical weapons, but if they have no practical potential to be used to cause harm, they are hardly relevant to the discussion. Especially because they were left over from the 80s, when it is already well known that Iraq had chemical weapons.
Saddam: Hi Osama, in order that you might meet our common objectives, I'm gifting you with several tonnes of scrap metal I dug up. It might have some sarin or related breakdown products, in unknown amounts. All you have to do is smuggle it into the US, find a way to extract the toxic stuff, and disperse it evenly into the subway! Just like the Aum Shin Ryku attack. Except, this time, maybe you will be able to disperse it effectively enough that some people actually die.
Osama: WTF dude?
I know this discussion is off-topic, but I hope people won't mark it down too much, as it is a salutary example of the massively degrading effect of political topics on quality of discussion.
I don't think that's enough for clear communication on this issue. People have different views about which kinds of weapons are bad, and for what reason, and what the implications of this badness are.
So, the most constructive thing to do at this point would be for each participant to spell out exactly which weapon production methods (be specific!) you would classify as a "WMD". Explain its functionality, the difficult parts in making them, and how a terrorist or government would go abount procuring those parts.
Once you've explained exactly how these so-called "WMDs" are produced can we come to any agreement about who's correct regarding Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War.
But what does this have to do with paper clips?
I don't think you're taking this discussion seriously, and that hurts my feelings. I'm not going to vote your comment down, but I am going to unbend a couple of boxes of paperclips at the office tomorrow.
I do not believe you.
Is that true? I've seen plenty of vicious political battles (with policy implications) fought over questions of fact (even easy questions), and plenty of incorrect "facts" linger as talking points long after the right answer has become evident.