Good point on WMD

Atrios makes an excellent point about the administration and the search for WMDs.

The only evidence we need to know that the administration is simply in CYA mode is the fact they don't seem very concerned about the "missing" WMD. If they really believed they existed, the hunt for them wouldn't be motivated by a desire to justify the war, it would be motivated by the very legitimate desire to make sure the deadly weapons were not in the hands of evil-doers.

There are many things the administration is doing that indicate they're not terribly worried about finding the WMD very quickly. These include their speculation that maybe Saddam just destroyed them all before we got to him and their shifting focus to try and say that the war was justified because we've found equipment that might indicate that they possibly had a WMD program, rather than WMDs themselves. Other signals are their refusal to allow the UN inspection teams to help with trying to locate the weapons, their lack of concern about the looting - in particular the 7 nuclear plants that have been looted - their pulling the main inspection team out of Iraq ahead of schedule (though it will be replaced with a different team), and the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam's regime, they failed to assign any troops to guard the sites they thought were most likely to have hidden WMDs.

One thing I find particularly disturbing is that prior to the start of the war, when Hans Blix and his team were still trying to do inspections in Iraq while Saddam was in power, a story came out that the inspectors were finding the intelligence given to them by the US to be "garbage". Questions have been being raised lately about whether the failure to find any WMDs is due to the government intentionally misleading the public about the existance of WMDs in order to raise support for the war, or if it'd because the information gathered by our intelligence committee was flawed, and the government simply acted in good faith on bad data. Given the comments by the UN inspectors and the difficulty they had finding anything using the information we were giving them, it sounds as though we had reason back then - prior to any attacks - to question whether the intelligence we were getting was sound or not.

Combine that with the way the administration has been acting since the "end" of the war and their nonchalance about securing potential WMD sites, et. al., and there starts to be something of an admittedly circumstantial case to substantiate the charge that they did intentionally mislead us about Saddam having WMDs and what kind of threat they posed. It's not proof, but I think its something that needs to be looked into in greater depth - and, more importantly, something that needs to be kept in mind if the administration tries to make the intelligence commitee the fall guy for this debacle.