No probs Soulmuh, I just believe that it is wrong trying to make changes like that. They should try and learn to fit in, rather than trying to have their own way all the time.
The Croatians did well against the French, and were unlucky not to win, but I reckon that we (England) can beat them (Croatia) on Monday.
Here are some articles I found regarding the war on Iraq:
Putin: We Told U.S. Saddam Was Planning Attacks
Associated Press: Friday, June 18, 2004
ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) Russia gave the Bush administration intelligence after the September 11 attacks that suggested Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was preparing attacks in the United States, President Vladimir Putin said Friday.
Putin said he couldn't comment on how critical the Russians' information was in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.
In Washington, a U.S. official said Putin's information did not add to what the United States already knew about Saddam's intentions.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, said the Russian tip did not specify a time or a place where an attack might take place.
The Bush administration in part justified the invasion of Iraq by saying Saddam had links to terror groups, including Al Qaeda. The U.S. commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said this week there was no evidence of any collaboration between Iraq and Usama bin Laden's terror network.
Putin said Russia didn't have any information that Saddam's regime was actually behind any terrorist acts.
"After Sept. 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, the Russian special services, the intelligence service, received information that officials from Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside it against the U.S. military and other interests," Putin said.
He said President Bush personally thanked one of the leaders of Russia's intelligence agencies for the information. There was no immediate comment from U.S. officials.
"It's one thing to have information that Saddam's regime is preparing terrorist attacks, (but) we didn't have information that it was involved in any known terrorist attacks," Putin said in the Kazakh capital Astana after regional economic and security summits.
Putin said the intelligence didn't cause Russia to waver from its firm opposition to the war.
"Despite that information about terrorist attacks being prepared by Saddam's regime, Russia's position on Iraq remains unchanged," Putin said.
Putin didn't elaborate on any details of the terror plots or mention whether they were tied to the Al Qaeda terror network.
The Sept. 11 commission reported this week that while there were contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq, they did not appear to have produced "a collaborative relationship."
Bush, however, insisted Thursday that Saddam had "numerous contacts" with Al Qaeda and said Iraqi agents had met with the terror network's leader, Usama bin Laden, in Sudan.
Saddam "was a threat because he had terrorist connections not only Al Qaeda connections, but other connections to terrorist organizations," Bush said.
Also Thursday, a top Russian diplomat called for international inspectors to conclusively resolve the question of whether Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction one of the main reasons Bush used to justify the war. No such weapons have been found since Saddam's fall.
"This problem must be resolved ... because to a great extent it became the pretext for the start of the war against Iraq," Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov said in Moscow, according to Interfax news agency.
He said such a finding would allow the U.N. Security Council to "turn a page and finally close the dossier on Iraqi weapons."
And.....
Iraqi Weapons in Syria
Post April 26, 2004
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
On Dec. 24, 2002, nearly three months before fighting in Iraq began, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accused Saddam Hussein's regime of transferring key materials for his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs to Syria in convoys of 18-wheel trucks to hide them from U.N. weapons inspectors. "There is information we are verifying, but we are certain that Iraq has recently moved chemical or biological weapons into Syria," Sharon told Channel Two television in Israel.
Before talking about this on Israeli television, Sharon gave detailed information to the Bush White House on what Israel knew and what it suspected. Insight has learned, however, that once the information was handed over to the U.S. intelligence community, officials at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) swept it aside as lacking credibility.
In May 2003, just as major combat operations in Iraq were winding down, new reports surfaced in Israel, this time alleging that convoys of Iraqi water tankers carrying WMD components crossed the border into Syria repeatedly between Jan. 10 and March 10. The tankers reportedly were met by Syrian special forces and escorted to the heroin poppy fields of a Syrian-controlled area in Lebanon's Bekáa Valley, where their contents were dumped into specially prepared pits and buried. Again, INR discounted the reports, U.S. officials tell Insight.
Reports of Iraqi WMD winding up in Syria were not just coming from the Israelis. In October 2003, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, revealed that vehicle traffic photographed by U.S. spy satellites indicated that material and documents related to Saddam's forbidden WMD programs had been shipped to Syria before the war. It was no surprise that the United States and its allies had not found stockpiles of forbidden weapons in Iraq, Clapper told a breakfast briefing given to reporters in Washington. "Those below the senior leadership saw what was coming, and I think they went to extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence," he said.
"We have had six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war," a senior administration official tells Insight. "In every case, the U.S. intelligence community sought to discount or discredit those reports."
This January, after he returned to Washington from Iraq, where for six months he had served as the CIA's top gun with the Iraq Survey Group hunting for Saddam's banned weapons, David Kay said he had uncovered evidence that weapons material had been moved to Syria shortly before the war. "We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he told the Sunday Telegraph in London. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."
Another piece of this puzzle was provided by a Syrian intelligence officer in letters smuggled to an antiregime activist living in Paris named Nizar Nayouf. In one letter the source identified three locations in Syria where WMD materials had been buried under an agreement between the Syrian and Iraqi leadership. Two of the sites were specially dug underground bunkers and tunnels. The third site was a factory operated by the Syrian air force in the village of Tal Sinan, located between the cities of Hama and Salimiyyah. In a follow-up letter dated Jan. 7, Nayouf's source provided more details on these locations, along with a map, and alleged that some of the weapons had been moved out of Iraq in ambulances.
So are Saddam's WMD stockpiles in Syria? When Insight asked the CIA if it was investigating these and other reports, a spokesman acknowledged there was "some evidence that way" and that the United States was "looking at all types of possibilities," but vigorously discouraged further inquiries. Administration officials tell Insight that the refusal to report on Syria's complicity with Saddam's regime stems from a "pro-Syria bias in the State Department and some elements of the intelligence community, whose threshold for evidence on Syria is suspiciously high."
Shoshana Bryen regularly escorts groups of retired U.S. military flag officers (admirals and generals) to Israel for meetings with senior Israeli political and military leaders, as well as intelligence officials. "We went to Israel just before the war and just after," she tells Insight. "Both times, Israeli intelligence officials told us, yes, WMD were definitely in Iraq, and that they had been sent to Syria." The Bush administration was trying to downplay these reports, she believes, "because if Iraqi weapons are in Syria, we're going to have to do something about it, and they don't want another war."
