Thursday, June 22, 2006
There Are No WMDs! There Are No WMDs!
Six weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Pentagon officials are quietly beginning to acknowledge that their failure to find Saddam Hussein may be proof that the Iraqi leader never existed.
"We hate to admit it," said one unnamed official, "One of our main reasons for going in there was regime change. You know...overthrow a brutal dictator who tortured his own people. But at this point, we're not sure there ever was a Saddam Hussein. After all, if we don't have him dead or alive...who's to say?"
The military official said that the statues, murals and videos of Saddam Hussein are "circumstantial evidence which don't prove anything."
Some wag once opined that Hell (or was it eternity?) was two people and a ham. After three years of false alarms, red herrings, discoveries of "outdated" munitions filled with chemical and nerve agents and the NY Times going down the yellowcake rabbithole over what Joe Wilson didn't find in Africa while the hundreds of tons of yellowcake uranium Saddam already possessed went largly unreported, weary supporters of the GWOT might be forgiven for concluding that Hell was three years of inspections and (to hear Congress and the lamestream media tell it) absolutely, positively no evidence of WMDs.
All of which rather makes yesterday's news seem like deja vu all over again:
Republican Congress members claimed late today that evidence of weapons of mass destruction hidden by Saddam Hussein had at last been identified in Iraq.
Speaking at a late afternoon press conference, Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, spoke with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. They claimed that 500 chemical weapons shells allegedly containing degraded sarin or mustard gas have been recovered by coalition forces since 2003, and that other filled and unfilled munitions have been found.
Santorum also attacked his "colleagues...on the other side of the aisle" for "repeatedly" claiming that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.
Rep. Hoekstra has called strongly for the release of a large cache of Arabic-language documents, believing that they would clarify the original case for war with Iraq. It is not known at this time if the information in any of the documents, available online at this Defense Department site led to the cache of alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The reaction was both immediate and predictable:Today, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) held a press conference and announced “we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” Santorum and Hoekstra are hyping a document that describes degraded, pre-1991 munitions that were already acknowledged by the White House’s Iraq Survey Group and dismissed.
Fox News’ Jim Angle contacted the Defense Department who quickly disavowed Santorum and Hoekstra’s claims. A Defense Department official told Angle flatly that the munitions hyped by Santorum and Hoekstra are “not the WMD’s for which this country went to war.”
Never mind that the presence of 500 agent-filled shells is tangible evidence Saddam was still lying to UN weapons inspectors. Nevermind the obvious inference that inspections were not, in fact, working terribly well either before or after the war. After all, only a fool would infer from this that inspectors could not find WMDs hidden in plain sight, not to mention if they'd actually bothered to inspect the full list of suspected sites:
The ISG’s search for significant stockpiles of WMD has so far come up empty. It may be that there are no large stockpiles, as Dr. Kay has stated. But from my perspective in the MOST, this lack of a positive finding may also be the result of unfocused and uncoordinated ISG search operations. It is entirely possible that the much sought-after WMD stockpiles may be literally right under the feet of coalition forces, and until a properly coordinated search effort is completed, no firm conclusions about their presence or absence can be reached. The case remains open.
In his recent testimony, Dr. Kay pronounced that there are no large stockpiles of WMD. This is a pretty bold assertion considering that actual surveys of sites we were familiar with were haphazard and uncoordinated. Also, according to his own interim report published in October of 2003, the ISG had not even searched 120 of the 130 known ammo storage points, much less any underground sites.
The important thing to remember is that David Kay conclusively proved there were no stockpiles of unconventional weapons. Did you hear me? None, I tell you:
Two days after resigning as the Bush administration's top weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay said Sunday that his group found no evidence Iraq had stockpiled unconventional weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March.
He said U.S. intelligence services owe President Bush an explanation for having concluded that Iraq had.
"My summary view, based on what I've seen, is we're very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons," he said on National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition." "I don't think they exist."
Yesterday's news had extremist Reich-wing war watchers like Michael Ledeen popping champagne corks and indulging in obscene bouts of irrational exuberance:
Please point out to your readers that Negroponte only declassified a few fragments of a much bigger document. Read the press conference and you will see that Santorum and Hoekstra were furious at the meager declassification. They will push for more, and we all must do that. I am told that there is a lot more in the full document, which CIA is desperate to protect, since it shows the miserable job they did looking for WMDs in Iraq.
Why, one would think from all the celebration that real evidence had actually been found:
2002/9
The Respected Supervisor of Saddam Feedayeens
Subject: Information
Salute and regards Sir
We received information that state the following:
1. A team from the Military Industrialization Commission when Hussein Kamel Hussein was conducting his responsibilities did bury a large container said that it contains a Chemical Material in the village (Al Subbayhat) part of the district of Karma in Fallujah in a quarry region that was used by SamSung Korean company and close to the homes of some citizens.
2. The container was buried using a fleet of concrete mixers.
3. Before the departure of the international inspectors in 1998 a United Nations helicopter flew over the region for two hours.
4. A large number of the region residents know about this container from the large number of machines used to hide it then.
5. It was noticed a non ordinary smell in the region.
Fortunately, the media have quickly stepped in to calm the hysteria. At times like these, it is profoundly reassuring to know that our press corps and the international community still remember where the real danger lies:The presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is considered a greater threat to Mideast stability than the current government in Iran, according to a new poll of European and Muslim countries.
Update: Austin Bayand The Sundries Shack have great roundups.
7 Comments:
By 
Gordon Smith, at
Thu Jun 22, 08:16:00 AM:
So, let me get this straight, you're saying the DoD and the Bush administration is lying to you about the existence of WMD?
I'm trying to figure this out because it seems that, when the DoD doesn't seize an 'opportunity' to justify the war, there's the possibility that the information doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Or maybe the entire Bush administration is hiding the information, so you'll have something to do?
This post is absurd. I preferred your very long one yesterday.
By Cassandra, at
Thu Jun 22, 08:21:00 AM:
Well now, given the reaction so far, don't you think it's possible that the administration simply preferred not to reopen this particular can of worms? As many have pointed out, this doesn't prove Saddam had an ongoing weapons program - just that he had stockpiles of older munitions, notably with binary payloads (that means the agent isn't activated until you mix two agents stored separately).
Some people would not be convinced there was anything to worry about it we found a cache of chemical or biological weapons right in the middle of Baghdad.
By Gordon Smith, at
Thu Jun 22, 08:27:00 AM:
So they're not lying about the WMD, they're just not "opening up a can of worms" by telling the truth?
Cuckoobananas.
Here's more fun info on intelligence estimates and WMD:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB129/index.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/interviews/pillar.html
I really, really hope you keep crowing about how there really were WMD and how everyone is just too stupid to realize it. It makes us loony lefties look positively sane.
By Cassandra, at
Thu Jun 22, 08:31:00 AM:
The "truth" has been in the few newspapers still interested in actually reporting the news, as you'd know if you'd bothered to click on any of the links.
And again, your reaction (AAAIIIEEE!!! I don't even want to entertain the possibility I might have been wrong! The heck with tangible evidence - look what Paul Pillar *says*!) just proves my point.
By 
, at
Thu Jun 22, 09:10:00 AM:
Watching the moonbats fly with one wing can make you very dizzy :-)
By Pax Federatica, at
Thu Jun 22, 10:59:00 AM:
All this strikes me as water under the bridge. Suppose we had found, and made public, these weapons discoveries on the day after Baghdad fell in 2003, vindicating the original justification for war. Does that mean everything would have turned out hunky-dory?
Of course not! We still would have had an insurgency on our hands. We still would have had al-Zarqawi to deal with. (Do you really think he cared about whether we found WMDs or not?) We still would have had to contend with sectarian divisions and the accompanying strife. We still would have had Abu Ghraib (and Haditha too, if it turns out to be the real deal). We still would have had the bombings in Madrid and London (to the extent that they were really responses to the Iraq War, which is debatable at best).
In short, none of the conditions that keep alive the notion of a quagmire in Iraq in June 2006 hinge upon the U.S. not first finding WMDs, then publicizing that find, in April 2003 - and WMDs or no, the quagmire meme is more than enough by itself to keep the antiwar Left going.
By Cassandra, at
Thu Jun 22, 11:29:00 AM:
Exactly.
I just find it amusing to watch people go ballistic over this instead of just getting on with what we're facing now.
I also find it amusing to see the papers literally fall all over themselves to ignore this as they continue to maintain they don't have an agenda regarding the war. What we know is not nearly as conclusive as either side wants to maintain, which makes this an interesting story: one you'd think might... oh, let's see ... be in your local fishwrap?
