Honestly, I think you're the one playing with semantics. The point isn't really whether one can justify calling the degraded materials "WMD" or not. The point is whether those (degraded) munitions posed any sort of credible, immediate threat at the time of the invasion.
No, this us your point, and it's invalid. If Iraq legitimately posed an immediate threat to American citizens via a Sarin bomb attack, we would have never invaded the country, we would have engaged in diplomatic talks, like we do with China and the former Soviet Union, and any other country that poses an immediate and direct threat to us. If we are vulnerable to an attack of mass destruction from our enemy, we don't go barging into their country, and wisely so. But you are correct, this is what Pinheads deemed as "the point" a long time ago, and simply tuned out all other debate on the matter. You are trying to argue that the only way it was legitimate for us to invade, is if they posed an immediate direct threat, and I am saying, that is essentially the only way we wouldn't have invaded.
You parsed what president Bush said, when he articulated that "we can't wait for the threat to become imminent" you understood him to say, the threat was imminent now, and we have to act. As I said in one of the other dozen Dixie obsession threads, the war was never about the immediate threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
In this discussion, there are two distinctly different criteria being used to define a WMD. One is, a naive and fundamentally stupid and simplistic notion that only things that are presently capable of causing mass destruction used as a weapon, are WMD's. The other, is a more well-reasoned and fact-based opinion supported by the Chemical Weapons Convention, the GC, UN resolutions, and findings in international law, on what is to be considered a WMD. In the real world, we use the conventional findings of the various bodies who created the words we are using to begin with, not some whimsical opinion of an idiot on a message board who can't spell.
It is fundamentally insupportable to invade another nation, killing thousands of people, simply because that nation might possibly be a threat. Our policy at that time was allegedly clear. We were never to preemptively invade another nation unless that nation posed a grave and imminent threat to the United States. Without significant stockpiles of WMD and the clear intent to use them, Saddam Hussen could not possible pose such an imminent threat
You are incorrect, our policy under the Bush Doctrine, is to take preemptive action to prevent an imminent threat. It has never been the foreign policy of the US, to take military action against an immediate and pending threat of significant reprisal, it's always been the policy to negotiate. With Liberals, it's always been the policy to give them anything they ever demand and never consider a military alternative.
