[1] http://www.itv.com/news/2017-10-13/hacking-threat-is-as-seri...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/27/uk-north-korea-behind-wannac...
That did not stop the UK from going ahead with their bit in the Gulf War. If a war is to be had evidence doesn't really matter. It could be fabricated far easier than you could have real evidence, history has quite a few examples.
Given the current political climate in the UK I would not put it past them to start making stuff up, a distraction from internal strife is always a good reason to start a war.
Microsoft - I hope - is another matter.
The reason why - at least, to me - there is little point to either the UK or the US wanting to start a war with NK is that unlike Iraq NK actually has a good chance of inflicting massive damage on an ally. Plus the lottery ticket of Kim being able to lob a nuke halfway across the globe and make it stick even if attacked might be another item that gives pause to the powers that be.
So, whether NK is behind these attacks or not is absent very solid proof an open question, whether or not the government is laying the grounds for war hardly matters, those are not necessarily connected, though they could be it would be a first to go to a shooting war with a nation state over a cyber attack.
A lot of evidence points to the official US entry into the shooting war in Vietnam after what appeared to be totally fictional attacks on the US Navy - because the president did not want to appear to be weak.
The other thing is the act of congress enabling the President to authorize force after 9/11 is almost unconditional if he/she just says terrorism. We should have rescinded that after Osama bin Ladin was killed.
The second trip was from 5 June 2003 to 11 June 2003 when Kelly went to view and photograph two alleged mobile weapons laboratories as a part of a third inspection team. Kelly was unhappy with the description of the trailers and spoke off the record to The Observer, which, on 15 June 2003, quoted "a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq." The expert said:
They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories.
You could not use them for making biological weapons.
They do not even look like them. They are exactly what
the Iraqis said they were – facilities for the
production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)
See also: the 45 minute claim.
No, the WMD claim by the US was not an honest mistake, it was a purposeful lie to be used as an excuse for war.
Here is a speech by GWB on Iraq in 2002: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/07/usa.iraq
The claim was that Iraq threatened USA. At the time, everybody knew this was a lie. Iraq did not have capable missiles to reach US territory and claims that it had a secret nuclear program were extremely dubious. Remember : the fear was nuclear ICBM, this is what was hammered in the media. They fell back to chemical weapons, but if the US plans to invade every country with a stock of chemical weapons, good fucking luck!
Colin Powell, presenting the threats to the UN council, put forward a nuclear threat. He used as proofs, documents that were fake. "Obvious fake" as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency would call them: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/03/14/sprj.irq.documents/
What he said about it: "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
These were not mistakes, these were lies: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-schwarz/colin-powell...
Iraq was (correctly it appears, in hindsight) fearing an invasion so it was worried that opening up to foreign inspectors would lead to espionage to prepare the invading forces.
In the end, as a last hope to preserve peace, it allowed inspectors in a mission, led by Hans Blix. Here is how he described the cooperation of Iraqi forces:
"Iraq has on the whole cooperated rather well so far with Unmovic in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has been prompt. We have further had great help in building up the infrastructure of our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services for our plane and our helicopters have been good. The environment has been workable."
> If I believed any conspiracy as far as Iraq goes
US disregarded that and still decided to invade. No one had a single doubt that this was about oil.
Iraq is a clear case of a conspiracy. This is actually a very good counter-point to conspiracy theorists: When a government tries to lie about something, it is really obvious, and it still works.
> US disregarded that and still decided to invade. No one had a single doubt that this was about oil.
I remember that being what everyone cried in opposition to the war with Iraq but I never understood it. How did oil factor into the war?
The Bush Adm. had its eyes on Iraq pre-9/11. It's mostly forgotten now, but there were Tomahawk cruise missile attacks on Iraq in the summer of 2001. I remember discussing it and even noted in a journal entry that summer that it looked like G.W.B. wanted to go back and finish G.H.W.B.'s job.
It was not as straightforward as just oil. I think that eventually history will settle on it being a more complex set of factors, some of which boiled down to personal animosity by the President, and a feeling that Hussein had been given a free pass by the US in 1991 and was using it to thumb his nose at the West and, in doing so, was in a position to build up power and status within the region on the basis of having "survived" a US-led invasion and deposition attempt. To conservative hawks, his continued existence was a reminder of US failure and impotence, which didn't fit with the US's unipolar, pax Americana / "hyperpower" ambitions at the time. It wasn't a war for territory as much as it was a very public execution (or, politely, "regime change"), pour encourager les autres.
Hussein was a dead man, in retrospect, when G.W.B. got elected; it just took the administration a while to figure out how to get the war they'd wanted from the beginning out of the post-9/11 environment. Absent 9/11, if you look at what was going on during the early months of the G.W. Bush presidency, they would probably have found a way to push Hussein into giving them a casus belli anyway (it's not like Saddam was the most level-headed dictator; given the resources of the entire State Department, one can safely assume the US would have come up with a way of making him overreach, and then grab that overreach to pull him off the cliff and into destruction).
The oil and strategic position of Iraq viz. Iran, Russia, Turkey, etc., certainly helped make the case and pushed aside what might have been probable objections (if we invade, how can we survive an oil boycott, a la 1973?), but saying that it was a "war for oil" as is sometimes claimed doesn't really wash. You don't need to go to war for oil at the price the US goes to war for, you just buy the damn oil. You go to war for things you can't buy with money.
I still don't understand why everyone keeps bringing this up as evidence that our approach towards NK is war mongering. Maybe some attention to NK has more to do with China and Russia than people tend to focus on, but it doesn't mean NK isn't a bad actor.
The true motivations of the different actors are diverse and as the president and his team is effectively above the law since Obama said he would not open an investigation for war crimes, we will have only speculations.
Bush may have had the willingness to continue his father's job or just simple religious beliefs: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/a...
Dick Cheney is the salient case for oil. He had enormous conflicts of interest, having led Halliburton, who reaped enormous war contracts in Iraq. John Kerry called for an investigation in 2004 about that: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/us/a-closer-look-at-cheney... We also know that hundreds of millions of dollars were erroneously/fraudulently charged to the US: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/...
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are core believer of the "Project for the New American Century" thinktank that sees the war against terrorism as WW4 (Cold War being WW3) and sees seizing oil resources as primordial. Yes, this is a really simplistic vision, but remember that these people are just slightly more intellectual than Trump's team...
The general public is a bit more forgiving when you're taken down by a nation state rather than a bunch of criminals preying on a deliberately unlocked door.
Microsoft, probably being mildly cognizant that you don't win new contracts by accusing lucrative customers of rank fucking idiocy especially when it's true, will naturally play along with the conspiracy theory, especially since the chances of strong evidence pointing to the actual culprits coming to light are so low.
I can see why Microsoft would want to deflect attention from its own failings to the bogeyman of the week, but I'm not sure what qualifies a private business to "officially" pronounce on weighty geopolitical matters that could result in WWIII.
When Microsoft falsely blamed Intel for Microsoft Surface failures[1], or falsely marked a non-Microsoft web browser as malware and removed it from thousands of PCs[2], at least the lives of millions of people weren't at stake.
A nation state would collapse long before it reached the point of being so broke it had to rely on - FFS - a Bitcoin ransomware attack to survive. I can't believe I'm actually having to type such an obvious thing, but apparently some people think otherwise.
What's North Korea's back up plan for economic survival, a chain letter?
It's a sorry world when people give the time of day to such transparently obvious and nonsensical propaganda, intended to suck us into yet another bloodbath, just because NK isn't a nice place to live.
> as did the UK government, neither of whom is trying to lay the groundwork for war.
Assuming that wasn't as a joke: the UK has been a lapdog of the USA (aka "Special Relationship"[3]) if not since WWII, certainly since the 1980s, when British people themselves openly referred to their country, even in popular chart songs[4][5], as the 51st State.
Of course the UK lacks the status and relevance in Washington DC of a real US state, and is simply treated (and behaves accordingly) like a reserve branch of US armed forces, supporting wars that serve US interests, including the one where at least 20% of North Korean human beings were exterminated by the US military.
[1] https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/microsoft-surface/132832/her...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-falsely-labels-chrome-as...
[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/obama-us-uk-j...