This gets the honor of “Climate Craziness of the Week”. Oh, that’s gonna leave a mark…
Josh writes in an email: her actual quote was:
“If we are to overcome the climate crisis we must move on to the equivalent of a war footing”
And she then likened the leadership this would require to Tony Blair’s in taking us to war in Iraq
But that’s too long for a satirical political cartoon, so Josh took the essence. Unfortunately I can’t seem to locate the online link as the Sunday Times link sends visitors to the paywall. It was in “features” and titled:
A very heated debate
Josh is working from the print edition in the UK, so I’ll take his word for it.
Here’s a letter Lucas penned in 2003 about the war in Iraq:
It is very telling. These quotes are pertinent:
They point not only to the imminent military war, which they recognise could have devastating consequences, but also to the ongoing economic war, which is being prosecuted by the US and Britain in particular, through the imposition of economic sanctions over a decade.
Um, in case you haven’t noticed lady, greens are waging economic war in the UK.
A recent broadsheet headline screamed: “Stop the war? Try telling that to the tyrannised people of Iraq.”
and …
An attack on the roads, bridges, ports or railways of Iraq would severely damage what is now an extremely well functioning food distribution system.
So will Lucas advocate stopping the tyrannizing of the British people by absurd green laws, protest takeovers of power plants by greens in the UK, Plane Stupid’s attacks on Heathrow airport, and threats of occasional electricity in the future?
Doubtful, in this case of greens -vs- the UK infrastructure, Lucas is the war leader.
Some deep self reflection is sorely needed by this confused woman.
Brent Hargreaves says: March 6, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Hologram: “Lucas is… a moron and illiterate.”
Anthony: “This confused woman.”
[Global Warmism is a strongly held belief system, planted by unscrupulous scientists and flourishing in the rich soil of apocalypticism.—-The real villains are the science advisors: defeat them and their half-baked conjectures and the politicians will change course.]
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You seem to have this back to front. The scientists are simply paid stooges of some politicians IMHO.
Douglas
Saddam averaged 40 deaths per day during his tenure.
Mariwarcwm says: March 6, 2011 at 1:00 pm
There seems to be a parallel with Libya – Gaddafi doesn’t allow free speech, . . .
France prosecuted and fined Brigitte Bardot for anti-muslim comments. It intends to prosecute and jail John Galliano for anti-Semitic comments. The last Lord Mayor of London was investigated for remarks. Dutch politician Geert Wilders was prosecuted for anti-muslim remarks (and a movie), Mark Steyn was prosecuted in Canada for allegedly anti-muslim writings.
And you can get years added on to your sentence if you happened to have said the wrong thing while committing a crime in America.
Halabja is not a funny or pleasurable watching experience but it does speak to the subject of WMD.
pat says:
March 6, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Mark G.
“Of course we knew Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons: we sold them to him.”
I don’t know who your ‘we’, is, but it was not the USA. The USA involved itself in very little trade with Saddam. About 1%. Absolutely no chemical weapons were sold.
Long ago, when the google search engine was more useful than it is now, I found evidence that both the U.S. and Britain sold Anthrax to Iraq. I have the proof on an old scsi 50 pin drive, but it’s proving to be difficult to recover the data.
Anthony, I should apologize. I prefer the science oriented posts but there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun. The don’t post my comments on Real Climate or Climate Progress anymore. You’re doing a grand job here. I’m addicted to your site, I’ve donated two or three times, and I voted for the site in the blog awards. Keep up the good work!
Let Caroline Lucas enjoy her moment of glorious stupidity as Brighton’s MP. She won’t be returned to office at the next general election. Spiralling costs and a wrecked economy because of fraudulent green policies will see to that
Mike McMillan says:
March 6, 2011 at 9:11 pm (Edit)
Saddam averaged 40 deaths per day during his tenure.
What’s the average since the invasion by the U.S.?
According to verified reports, around 104,000 deaths as a direct result over 7 years.
=40.676 deaths per day.
Plus ca change.
Iagree wit mouch of what has beensaid here.[dude?] Up to & including:-
Peter H says:
March 6, 2011 at 10:37 am
“Lucas is a 1st class moron and illiterate”
No she probably isn’t. She is however arrogant, ignorant, privileged, supercilious, & lives in a world of all her dear little own. She refuses to listen to logic or reason, or common sense of all things, because it doeasn’t fit her prejudiced blinkered views, merely because she has a cause to battle for without thinking anything through, she wants to keep the little people little, & the big people big, but with an environmental smile of her face. After all, she is independently wealthy, is paid an emormous taxpayer funded salary, expenses, & taxpayer funded pension on top, & like the rest of those with their fat noses in the taxpayer funded trough, what do they actually for it return? Sweet Fanny Adams, IMHO!
Josh’s excellent cartoon seems to have triggered a wave of irrationality. Caroline Lucas (Phd) MP, is not illiterate but does seem to have a strange yearning for the rigours of a war that she is too young to have experienced; perhaps her priveledged upbringing and private education provided by her wealthy industrialist family has induced a guilt complex about her never having been cold or hungry or under physical threat, or perhaps she has watched too many re-runs of that wonderfully dated sitcom, ‘Dad’s Army’.. I remember post-war rationing and it was not fun at all; if Ms Lucas has a desire to experience a return to to this meagre and stringent lifestyle I suggest she tries wild camping under canvas during winter – a couple of days of this should change her somewhat odd state of mind.
Caroline Lucas MP is the first ‘Green’ politician to get a seat at Westminster. She represents Brighton and Hove in Sussex, rather like California in its thinking so will soon go bankrupt. The last by-election was won by Labour (no surprise considering the area Barnsley a staunch Labour area) but the real surprise was who came second- UKIP who consider CAGW to be ‘not proven’ and policies based on it to be wrong. the Green party came nowhere.
Caroline Lucas MP is the first ‘Green’ politician to be voted into Westminster. She represents Brighton and Hove in Sussex. This area is rather like California, without the nice climate, so will soon be bankrupt. The last by-election was won by Labour which was no surprise considering that the area is staunch Labour. The Surprise was who came second- UKIP. They consider CAGW to be unproven and policies based on it to be bad for the country. The Greens came nowhere.
Your reiteration of such false propaganda and inability to recognize obligations, recognize responsibilities, or recognize the differences in moral imperatives is repugnant and unsurprising.
Um, this is Carloine Lucas saying this, the same Caroline Lucas that is Vice President of the “Stop the War” coalition?
I don’t get it – she’s saying we should have a “War on Iraq” style enounter on AGW but is actually fundamentally opposed to the actual War on Iraq??? Bizarre.
Anyway, you should take a look at her bio on Wikipedia. She’s linked with every radical left wing cause going. Then she has links with a number of organisations not normally considered radical left-wing but which have shown radically left-wing tenedencies since she got involved – like Oxfam and the RSPCA. She is the very worst kind of Gramscian socialist and she should be monitored at all times. Wherever she goes she spreads Marxist poison.
That is a flat out slander and lie by deception. Biomedical reference samples were sold to Iraq by a number of Western nations because they were obligated by the United Nations WHO (World Health Organization) treaties to comply with Iraq’s requests for these medical samples. Refusal to comply with the Iraqi requests for the samples could have been used by the Iraqi Government and their anti-American supporters to accuse the Untied States of harming the health and welfare of innocent Iraqi civilians at risk from natural Anthrax threats endemic in Iraq and dependent upon Western research samples to combat the disease. Weaponizable Anthrax was more available from natural sources within Iraq or already weaponized samples from North Korea, Russia, and like supporters of such biowarfare research. Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime abused their UN privileges to receivee the samples from the Western UN repositories by uing them to develop dfensees against Anthrax weapons they weere developing from altogether non-Western sources.
The attempt to mislead the public into believing the Western nations were knowingly and deliberately tying to supply Anthrax to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime for use in biological weapons is truly outrageous and false.
Caroline Lucas is a British Member of Parliament.
Quite astonishing really considering her party’s share of the national vote was less that that of the neo-fascist
British National Party (BNP).
Quite correctly the BNP are considered a bunch of loonies, I cannot for the life of me work out why Lucas’s party
is not considered in the same light.
richard verney:
How can Caroline Lucas be “knowingly and deliberately inflicting this missery on millions of people in the developing world and knowingly and deliberately consigning many to an early and avoidable death.” when she is just an opposition backbench MP? I just don’t get the hysteria we see here when one MP (ONE) out of 650 is a Green Party MP. Me thinks you protest to much.
r brearley. Ms Lucas is as entitled to here view on the best kind of society to live in as you are – I’d defend the right of all people to have views. But, I’m not aware she’s dished out the kind of insults she’s got here – maybe she has and you could post a few examples? It’s a poor look out if the best response to green political views people here have is insult.
Alan the Brit. “She is however arrogant, ignorant, privileged, supercilious, & lives in a world of all her dear little own.” insulting and patronising. Is that the argument against her kind of politics you have? So angry and so little of substance…
@ur momisugly Dirk H:
Notice the date on that memo?
Back in 1991, this was the time that the UN discovered it could not trust Saddam. At this time it was indeed thought that the Iraqis could create agents and chemicals which may have a long shelf life.
By 1998 it was well known to the UN inspectors that these defunct weapons had never been created to a high standard, the quality control had been non-existant, labs were less than sanitary and the weapons would have indeed been inert as the Former UN inspectors had been reporting to anyone that would listen back in 2003.
I was amazed to listen to several former UN inspectors early one morning (3:00 am February 2003) on the BBC of all places, telling of their experiences and of the blatant lies that the media was telling about inspections, the nature of the weapons, the extent of successful disarmament etc…
Shame that the mainstream media only covered this once at 3:00 am, instead of prime time, but it gave me a lead of where to look for more corroborative information. I could not believe it at the time and did a lot of digging.
The UN inspectors on the ground, and their spook assistants where constantly telling of repeatedly inspecting the same wrecked labs, rubble of destroyed factories, and piles of sand, for what Washington and London and elsewhere were telling them was DEFINITELY accurate intelligence of on-going WMD programmes.
All of these leads came from the same offices (Rockingham) (ISG) and others in the States, where these offices were cherry picking intelligence, inventing ‘intelligence’ and taking single-source, uncorroborated nonsense from defectors who had not set foot inside Iraq in over a decade. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were bypassing the CIA to get their own intelligence into the public domain. All of which was lies. The actual spooks were continuously reporting in 2003 that there was NO evidence of a continued WMD programme. Rockingham (UK) ISG and other offices were reporting (false) intelligence as if it were real intelligence that actually, Saddam does have WMD.
These leads were 100% entirely wrong. The west even faked information about Uranium Yellowcake from Niger. Every lead was false and every utterence from the west was disproven and debunked within days. the September and February dossiers from the UK were both full of known lies (exaggerations), with all qualifying caveats removed. The February dossier was a couple of thesis about the Iraq of 1988, which were downloaded from the internet, tampered and exaggerated to make Saddam sound even worse than he actually was, and then fraudulently published by HMG as “the latest intelligence”. That was a blatant and total flat out LIE!
IF they had any shred of real intelligence that Saddam had WMD, why did they have to lie like that?
Additionally, the UN inspectors were telling any media that would listen that they were getting 100% unprecedented and total co-operation from Saddam and his regime in the last couple of months running up to the 2003 invasion and that they only needed about 4 more months and a few hundred million dollars to satisfy themselves that Saddam HAD disarmed. Better that, than the trillion dollars and million lives which have been spent to tell us the same thing.
If anything should convince you as to the ridiculously amateurish level of the administration’s cooked “intelligence”, (rather than the real intelligence), it would have to be the utterly laughable assertion of GW Bush that they found the mobile weapons labs. The British still had the reciepts for these battlefield helium generators for battlefield weather balloons (used for targeting purposes in the Iraq Iran war (when Iraq were on our side remember) ).
No matter that they knew for a fact that these were NOT mobile weapons labs, how the hell do you create what GW described as “the deadliest biological weapons on the planet” in a curtain sided truck??? It is so utterly ridiculous, I cannot believe that the attended world press did not laugh GW out of the room. These kinds of agents require at least four stages of extensive filtration requiring a massive facility. You CANNOT create them on curtain sided trucks.
As for Saddam being in Breach of UN 1441? Well if anyone was in Breach of UN resolution 1441, it was the USA, who took delivery of the total audit of Saddam’s weaponry, (as required for full disclosure), then removed most of it, before passing on what was left to the Security Council as an incomplete record of his arms. they did this in FULL public view of the whole world and nobody in the media said a thing!
The Western powers and their puppet media lied to justify war. Just as they are lying now to justify higher taxes and more controls over all of us in the name of “climate disruption”
This is NOT a left vs right thing. This is an elitist vs the people thing. Western governments, left or right wing are pursuing EXACTLY the same agenda and NOTHING will change at all, AT ALL until the people wake up and realise that the divide and conquer of ‘liberal vs Conservative’ is playing directly into the hands of the globalist elitists who are pushing CAGW for all they are worth!
How many times to the elite and their puppet media have to lie to you all, before you realise what the agenda is?
Sun Spot says:
March 6, 2011 at 3:34 pm
@James Baldwin Sexton says: March 6, 2011 at 12:06 pm; et al
There were no WMD’s in Iraq period,…………….
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http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/06/the-sunday-silly-josh-on-why-the-climate-change-war-is-like-the-war-in-iraq/#comment-614914
Anything else?
#
#
tallbloke says:
March 7, 2011 at 12:00 am
pat says:
March 6, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Mark G.
“Of course we knew Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons: we sold them to him.”
I don’t know who your ‘we’, is, but it was not the USA. The USA involved itself in very little trade with Saddam. About 1%. Absolutely no chemical weapons were sold.
Long ago, when the google search engine was more useful than it is now, I found evidence that both the U.S. and Britain sold Anthrax to Iraq. I have the proof on an old scsi 50 pin drive, but it’s proving to be difficult to recover the data.
=======
I have read the same docs! they are reprinted in the back of a book I read recently and have gone blank on the name of:-( they are around on the net though.
Dr David Kelly said there were NO WMD and he was murdered for telling the truth..
10:10 anyone?
The comparison between Iraq WMD and AGW Science lies in the dangers of expert consensus. Unlike AGW, the professional consensus on WMD was nearly total.
I was in the intelligence community at the time and, although Iraq was not in my area of responsibility, I didn’t know a single analyst in the run-up to 2003 who doubted their existence.
The comparison is striking I think. In Iraq, there was a handful of Mideast and WMD analysts who sincerely believed that Iraq had WMD stockpiles, an ongoing program, and intent to use the weapons. This analysis was taken as gospel and used and amplified in self-validating circular reporting by others. As for me, I truly believe that capability implies intent and when I deployed to Kuwait and Iraq in March and April 2003, I was more than a little apprehensive about finding myself in a chemical/biological warfare environment—MOPP gear was training I took very seriously.
Likewise, look at the volume of work on the effects of AGW that is based on the assumption that a much smaller body of work by a handful of scientists, say, Hansen, Jones, Mann, is correct. I don’t know what the percentage is, but I would make a swag that three-quarters or more of the AGW narrative is simply based on the assumption that those fellows have it right.
In both cases, it is a false consensus based on the premise that the real “experts” know what they are talking about….
No, it was not a false consensus at all. The experts mostly did know what they were talking about. What they could not control was the evacuation of the remaining WMD through Syria in June 2002 to March 2003 in accordance with the old Soviet deception plans. The WMD assets were generally moved by airliner and truck into Syria, from which some of the assets were subsequently transshipped to Belarus, while others were transshipped through the Sudan, Somalia, and North Korea.
During the niights immediately preceding the Coalition invasion, CNN news reports broadcast night vision videos of the long line of tanker trucks stretching from Baghdad to the Syrian border. Later eyewitness reports from the truck drivers themselves indicated how some of them were killed by their leaking cargoes and were replaced by another driver by the Iraqi security services to complete the tanker truck’s journey to Syria.
There’s obviously a lot to be said about Saddam and WMD, including the oft-forgotten Halabja, but the impression given is that the mere ownership of chemical weapons was the basis for the invasion of Iraq, and the implication is that, had the WMD claims been more accurate, there would have been justification for military action.
As we see with Libya, the type of weaponry a force uses is secondary to its intent and ruthlessness, and all bystanders anguish, as always, over whether to intervene or not.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Oliver Ramsay,
Here’s a picture of the Iraqi WMDs being evacuated to Syria just before the invasion.
You know the big lie has made the rounds when otherwise thoughtful people regurgitate Hussein talking points (that’s Saddam, not Barry). The War was about REMOVING the regime from power in accordance with UN Resolutions (17 of them) and the Clinton era official policy, it was never a WMD easter egg hunt. Powell had a last ditch effort speech before the UN (quick Google hit here) to stave off the war, which was clearly his personal point of view. They even offered Hussein a form of amnesty / exile. Truth is they went so far to accommodate the State department and leftist anti-war group-think that the regime (Saddam, not Barry) had too much time to prepare, just like the previous Gulf War. From December 2001 (when Iraq was placed on the table) to March 2003 was over 14 months of discussion and planning. The attack window was discussed every day in the media and I believe they got it to within four days of the actual invasion (the only surprise was probably the decapitation strike). This is what happens when you bend over backwards to accommodate the shallow thinkers acting as Saddam’s pro-bono defense team. And this is what Bush gets! Attacked anyway for painstakingly following the letter of the law, giving up all real hope of surprise and therefore placing US lives at higher risk!
Iraqi WMD was never THE point, only obsessive/compulsive lazy people latched onto that, the question of WMD and the infamous inspection run-around was the FINAL point. Considering just their recent history, assassination plan thwarted against former president Bush 41 (during Clinton), and thousands, I repeat THOUSANDS of attacks on our Military defending the no-fly zones (you do know this is an act of war right?), this regime change was long overdue. (Hint: What if North Korea began firing into the DMZ thousands of times) Then there was the long simmering Oil-For-Food fiasco, at the time the largest organized crime operation in history (likely succeeded by AGW) was the underpinning of all the foot dragging. Never forget that none of this took place in a vacuum, it occurred in light of the September 11 attacks, the administration placed high priority on removing future threats (and Iraq was always within the top 5 of all threats, and we were already there in theater), so we finally get to ultimatum time for Saddam, leave Iraq or face the consequences. He chose poorly.
This whole event was a compromise, they strictly followed the UN, its 17 resolutions and questionable inspections to finally get to an action that was meant to put teeth into their procedure. And this is the thanks we get from the bedwetters. My opinion now after years of thankless criticism is F’all’ya’ll. I say we pull out of the UN, let these parasitic enemy governments fall and destroy each other, and perform unilateral action whenever necessary, including nukes. To hell with diplomacy. We’ve tried it their way, the UN way, the bedwetter way, the democrat way, enough! We’ve walked softly, time to wield the big sticks. I hope the leftists are proud of themselves, unintended consequences are a {snip}.
AGW does compare here but not in the way you stated it. The AGW lunatics are making it up as they go along which is exactly what this Bush/Cheney/Halliburton horse{snip} is. That goes ridiculously far beyond plain stupidity almost to defamatory. To think he would send US soldiers to their death to benefit some company’s bottom line is certifiably insane! The Iraq vets I know would defend Cheney to the death and wouldn’t take a {snip} on someone who said this even if they were on fire! Anyway, here on Planet Earth you will actually find that most who believe this nonsense also believe in AGW. You can find them by day wearing sandwich boards along Times Square stating The End is Near, by night they’re busy phoning in to Coast to Coast.
Exactly who is We? And what weapons exactly? How would we sell them anyway? The Army collects the money? Get real. This lie has been circulating since the mid 1980’s from the socialist democrats and is now morphing into really creepy stuff. They used to say Rumsfeld and Reagan sided with Iraq (Reagan pursued a stalemate deferring to the State department over Hawks that wanted Iran taken down); and later they changed it to we armed Iraq (myth exploded in the Gulf War when we faced and/or destroyed countless Soviet T-xx tanks, landmines, AAA and SCUDs and AK-47 rifles while their Soviet/French made Air Force fled to other countries).
Of course you are probably alluding to the fact that some USA based company (as well as other countries) sold some chemical precursors to them and that is the same thing in your mind, right? Following your illogic, nothing could ever be sold to anybody, especially fertilizer, peroxide, petroleum or any food. If we wanted to arm Iraq we could have, there was plenty of money to be made. But sorry to disappoint, the evil USA stayed out of it. Don’t worry though, you’ll get your chance to bash the USA when Saudi or Israel engage against Iran using really good weapons that we really did supply.
Exactly who Lied? And what did they Lie about? Can you tell me something that does not have a shelf life? Your argument is specious, even nukes have shelf lives but I can assure you we still have them even after perishable ingredients expire. Following such thin evidence as UN inspector lists of chemicals that were actually seen (and ignoring those that went unseen) strikes me as vapid. If the health inspector gives a politically motivated cursory inspection at your child’s school because of a gas leak or acid spill and says its ok, the school is just fine wouldn’t you even question it? I love people who hold murdering dictators like Saddam to a lower standard than they would their babysitter, school bus driver or health inspector.
AGW and Iraq? ROTFL. How about this: there is as much evidence that we lied to go to war as there is evidence that manmade AGW from CO2 will destroy the planet. I suggest you (and some others) re-examine your AGW comparison, because you will find that this USA bashing: ‘they lied‘ crap comes out of the AGW cultist mouth more than any other. All AGW cultism requires is blind loyalty to a faith, a point of view. By comparison, the ‘faith’ in this area is belief that the USA are greedy capitalist warmongers, and, that Saddam should have been left in power (because ‘he was contained’). Naturally, I believe neither, but you may continue believing whatever you want, without any evidence just like AGW! That entire paragraph could have been written by Alan Colmes (who parrots democratic talking points for a living). Rule of thumb, take the opposite of whatever position Alan Colmes takes, you will be correct 99.999% of the time.
Well since I know that you are a good guy I’ll just say this: I am unaware of anybody selling weaponized Anthrax to anyone. Even if we had some in useful weapon form, we would not have enough to sell, and I highly doubt it is worth the trouble to maintain as a weapon because there are far better ways to eliminate an enemy! No president would ever say ‘give them some Anthrax’ when we could actually supply weapons that could make a difference. Now about non-weaponized pathogens, which is where all these BLAME AMERICA stories originate, there is no preventing their manufacturer or distribution. The world has no interest in stopping the big stuff like U235 enrichment in Iran and the easy to make Little Boy that will result, so what are the chances of chasing down microscopic samples of anything? Besides as Iraq told the UN: it made enough botulinum toxin in 1989, 1990 and 1991 in theory to wipe out the Earth’s population several times over. And, they also produced Anthrax. That article also speaks of precursor Strains of pathogens purchased from many places. But no-one ‘armed’ them or intended to. Besides, when you have BILLIONS of dollars at your disposal strawmen purchases trump any plan at thwarting proliferation. If something can be done, it will be done. It makes no sense to blame the USA or UK for something this technologically trivial. Blaming the west for the sins of tinpot dictators is a blood libel, propaganda from the international socialist cabal who usually support these dictators in the first place.
And then there’s this, Anthrax infection is an old, common, natural disease (here in the states at least). Samples of this and many other viral and bacteriological pathogens are routinely shipped between infectious disease agencies. We could also be accused of supplying country xxx with Small Pox and Spanish Flu. Now we can debate whether this is a good idea or not, and it may not be, but we weren’t invited to the party. It has been long ongoing in the so-called spirit of humanity and international co-operation. These projects occur at the State department and UN level or below, and transcend politics. Personally I believe that agreements like this never help the USA, almost everyone we deal with has something to gain where we don’t. I believe that this is just another raping of the taxpayer, where we get to fund disease research in other countries. We in the USA could shut the doors tight and say screw you and still survive just fine. However, my opinion hasn’t been implemented (yet), so in the meantime the globalist: ‘it takes a village‘ crowd comes up with all these information sharing arrangements (if you don’t like it complain to them). This is yet another vector for proliferation.