Uh, did we say weapons? We meant weapons programs

That seems to be the current attitude of the Bush administration. If they can't show us any weapons, then maybe we'll back down if they can show that Iraq had a weapons program. Many conservatives will say that there's little difference between having weapons and having a weapons program, but the reality is that the difference is significant. Weapons can be fired and used to attack other countries. A weapons program cannot. It's the difference between an immenent danger and a potential danger down the road a bit.

Part of the reason for this shift in focus is that this past week, we managed to find two trailers that are set up as mobile chemical labs. Bush is claiming that these two trailers are proof that Iraq had a biological or chemical weapons program, and bases his claim on a CIA report on the trailers that was released last week. There are just a few problems with this.

• There were no traces at all of any chemical or biological weapons inside the trailers, meaning that if they were used for manufacturing biological or chemical weapons, someone took the time to thoroughly decontaminate every single surface in the trailer, but didn't have time to take the equipment apart and disperse or destroy it.
  
  
• In a similar vein, remember that since we haven't found any weapons so far, our officials are now claiming that Iraq may have dismantled, destroyed or moved all of the weapons they had. If they had the time and wherewithall to do that, then why would they have left these two trailers around to serve as potentially incriminating evidence?
  
  
• Quoting from the Slate article:

  The report also notes that, in order to produce biological weapons, each trailer would have to be accompanied by a second and possibly a third trailer, specially designed to grow, process, sterilize, and dry the bacteria. Such trailers would "have equipment such as mixing tanks, centrifuges, and spray dryers"—none of which were spotted in the trailers that were found. The problem, the CIA acknowledges, is that "we have not yet found" these post-production trailers. Question: Is it that they haven't been found—or that they don't exist?

• From a sidebar to the Slate article:

  Another question is raised by the following passage in the May 29 New York Times story about the CIA report: "And the mobile factories were poorly designed. For instance, one official noted, Iraqi biologists running the plants would have had a hard time getting raw materials into the production gear and removing multiplied colonies of deadly germs." One wonders: How hard is "a hard time"? If a worker couldn't get raw materials in or the deadly germs out, then what kind of bio-production plant was this? Was it "poorly designed" or designed for some other purpose?

• The way that the analysts decided that these trailers were being used for bioweapons production was, essentially, to rule out any other purpose. The problem with that is that there are other potential purposes for the labs - such as the production of hydrogen for weather ballons or creating bio-pesticides and fertilizer for farming. The CIA report dismisses such suggestions, saying that the trailers weren't optimally designed for those purposes. Yet it would appear that if one or more other labs would have been needed in conjunction with these trailers to produce bioweaopns, then the trailers really aren't optimally designed for that purpose either.
  
  
• The author of the Slate article notes that he spoke to two bioweapons specialists who had questions of their own about the trailers. One noted that, based on photographs from the CIA, pipes leading into a chamber were of the wrong kind for making bioweapons, as they would cause leaks that could contaminate the bioweapons themselves or kill the people working on them. The other noted that the report doesn't indicate if a thermal-control meter was part of the equipment found. If there is no thermal-control meter, then the trailers could not possibly have been used for growing biotoxins.

Granted, these trailers do appear to be equipment that was banned by the UN resolutions, but at this point, after all the assurances that Iraq did, indeed, have significant weapons of mass destruction (specifically, enough to make 38,000 liters of botulinium toxin, 25,000 liters of anthrax and 500 tons of sarin, mustard gas and VX nerve agent) and, as a result, posed such an immenent threat to the US that we just had to go to war immediately, we deserve to be shown a great deal more than two trailers that may - or may not - have been used for bioweapons production as proof that the government wasn't lying to us just so they could get the war they so desparately wanted.