Molly’s column has a few words to say about the vaunted Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq:
The sour joke is: “Of course we know the Iraqis have weapons of mass destruction. We have the receipts.”
At this point, the administration would probably be delighted if it could find the WMDs that the Reagan administration gave Saddam Hussein. At least it could point to some WMDs.
This is a “what if …” column, since I have no idea whether Saddam was or was not sitting on great caches of chemical and biological weapons.
What is clear is that not finding the WMDs is getting to be a problem — and if we don’t find any, it’s going to be a bigger problem. And if we do find some, we’d better make plenty sure that they come with a chain-of-evidence pedigree, or no one is going to believe us.
You don’t have to be an expert on WMDs in the Middle East to know that when the administration starts spreading the word that “it wouldn’t really make any difference if there were WMDs or not,” it’s worried about not finding any.
… The United States, which insisted it could not give U.N. weapons inspectors so much as 10 days more to search, so dangerous were these WMDs, now says it needs months to find them.
In the meantime, we are clearly being set up to put the whole issue of WMDs down the memory hole. Here are the lines of argument advanced by the administration so far:
• Saddam did have WMDs, but in a wily plot, he poured them down a drain right before we invaded, just so he could embarrass George W. Bush.
• The WMDs are still there, but in some remote desert hiding place that we may never be able to find. “Just because we haven’t found anything doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,” one Pentagon source told the Los Angeles Times. Right.
• Saddam had WMDs, but he handed them off to the Syrians just before we came in. Or maybe it was to the Iranians.
• Well, maybe Saddam didn’t have huge stores of WMDs, but he had critical blueprints, weapons parts and, most ominously, “precursor chemicals,” so he could have manufactured WMDs.
• Well, maybe he didn’t have WMDs ready to deliver. The Pentagon has already backtracked on the Scud missile claim.
… Maybe the American people can be brainwashed into forgetting why we supposedly went to war. Near as I can tell, our national memory span is down to about two weeks, and the media have been spectacularly unskeptical on this issue.
But the rest of the world is not going to forget that WMDs were our primary reason for an unprovoked, pre-emptive war.
