Ehud Barak Quotes
If one single chemical warhead falls on Israel, we’ll hit Iraq with everything we have got.... look at your watch and forty minutes later an Iraqi city will be reduced to ashes.
The threat was to use nuclear weapons on Iraq if Saddam Hussein fired any missiles at Israel armed with Chemical Weapons which Iraq had at the time. Saddam fired some missiles but all had conventional explosives which did little damage. However, Israel was not even involved in the Gulf War. The threat obviously worked.
Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel, Member of Israeli Knesset (Labor), Israeli Director of Intelligence & Army Chief of Staff, Israeli Deputy Chief of Staff at the time, Threat which he asked King Hussein of Jordan to pass Saddam Hussein at a secret meeting in England during the Gulf War
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb. The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb
The Minister equates the unintended consequences of war and civilian casualties with a terrorist retaliation which has as its purpose the killing of as many civilians as possible. The proliferation of terrorism complicated the ethics of counter terrorism. In the case of Palestinian terrorists their tactics included using civilian facilities---schools, hospitals, homes---from which to launch rocket attacks or to store weapons or hide terrorists. Under international laws of war, a civilian facility and the civilians in it become legitimate military targets the minute that weapons are stored in or fired from that location or that location is used for planning, training, equipping or manufacturing of military material. Palestinian terrorists claim that even though civilians were harmed in legitimate, legal attacks on military targets, a proper response is to send suicide bombers into civilian areas and preparing the explosives with nails and rat poison to cause as much pain as possible.
It is with this certainty that the Vice President led the effort to invade Iraq in a preemptory war. After the invasion it was discovered that Iraq did not have any nuclear weapons or any other WMDs. Further, Iraq had no WMD development program of any kind. The rationale for the Iraq War was nill.
Powell's Performance was a great boost for U. S. foreign policy because he was so respected for his integrity. Powell persuaded much of the diplomatic community that the United States was justified in invading Iraq. Tragically, what Powell said was not true. He had been given false and doctored information by the CIA, the Vice President, and others at the White House. Powell lost the great respect that much of the diplomatic world had for him, and the affect on him was personally devastating. He took no more public positions. The change in American public opinion about Powell that resulted was dramatic even though Powell himself was deceived.
The claims of the President that Hussein even had weapons of mass destruction were untrue. Eagleburger’s criteria for war would have been even more stringent as is clear in this quotation. Foreign affairs experienced members of the President’s own party tried to dissuade him from this disastrous plan of invading Iraq but were unable to.
A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.
It is easy for those in London to wish for missiles and other weapons to be launched at others. If an Iranian missile were to hit Israel, he would celebrate. Then when the Israeli retaliation strike hits Iran, he will be among the first to call for a cease fire and plead for intervention lest there be bloodshed in Iran. Somehow the Middle East has a disproportionate number of people who are terribly enthused about attacking others without considering the consequence of the retaliation and counter attack.
This rhetoric turned out to be just that. When Israel developed a nuclear capability, the Egyptians became more rational and sobered. It was Anwar Sedate however who was the Egyptian leader wise enough and strong enough to make peace with Israel.
The U. S. and Russia
The CIA intelligence had been shared with key world leaders to gain support for the George W, Bush administration invasion of Iraq. Blix was bothered by the fact that although the intelligence was so certain why were not any of the locations known. The answer, of course, was that there was no such development and the intelligence was faulty, but at the time, only he seemed to be bothered by this point. See also {588115}.
Ehud Barak is an Israeli general and politician who served as the tenth Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001. He was leader of the Labor Party until January 2011. He previously held the posts of Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister under Ehud Olmert and then in Benjamin Netanyahu's second government from 2007 to 2013, as he retired from politics at the end of the tenure, though he returned in June 2019 with the formation of a new party.
