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April 25, 2003
Recommended reading
RonK at Cogent Provocateur has a long, but very much "worth it" essay on the WMD question. I'm quoting a couple of substantial excerpts, but there's a lot more to the essay and I strongly recommend reading it. He not only looks at how and why we may have been misled about the existence of WMD in Iraq, but also the repercussions of our having done that on the world stage. As with any "warning" of what might be, its possible his case may be somewhat overstated, but I think there's more than enough validity in his ideas that they're worth at least thinking about.
On whether or not we were duped:
The joke is on us, but does it matter any more? We won, didn't we?Yes, we won ... and yes, it still matters, else high officialdom wouldn't be clinging gamely to the original premise. And the PR labs wouldn't be working overtime testing damage control solutions.
From August's "what's all this frenzy about a war?", to September's "you don't introduce new products in August", through November's election victory over an opposition "soft" on Saddam, through the winter games of spinning Blix on ice, through Powell's PowerPoint prestidigitation in February, to a no-time-to-vote forced March, we plied the crowd with predictable fare. We loosened them up with liberation cocktails. We circulated tray after tray of Saddam-as-Hitler appetizers. We dutifully jotted down orders for commercial or strategic side-dishes. But the main course was always a grand sterling-covered platter of sizzling Snipe a la Bush.
No WMD, no War Powers Resolution. No WMD, no UN Res. 1441. No WMD, no Coalition of the Willing. No WMD, no Azores ultimatum. Everything hinged on Iraq's possession of WMD, and her intransigent refusal to give them up. Scratch the surface of any auxiliary casus belli, and chances are you'll find a circular argument: "Saddam is evil and dangerous. How do we know? Because he has WMDs. How can we be so sure he has WMDs? Because he's evil and dangerous."
and on some of the recent possible explainations as to why we've not yet been able to find any evidence of Iraq's WMD:
So we haven't found any WMD. There are plenty of reasonable explanations ... depending how warm the audience is. Try one of these on for size:Saddam had WMDs, which were incinerated in coalition attacks. Funny, that's what Saddam said last time ... at least in part ... and we didn't buy it then. Probably true, in part ... but too convenient, on the whole.There are a couple of late entrants in the reinvention derby. Most prominent is a report by NYT's Judith Miller, embedded with MET Alpha. In this version, an informant reveals that Saddam ordered all WMD destroyed just days before the war. So ...We found WMD, but it's so secret we can't reveal it. Not credible ... not even if there's a Carlyle Group logo on every item.
WMD are hidden so well nobody has found them yet ... the "vault thesis". Incompatible with the standard thesis, and equally devastating to US intel reputation ... but faintly plausible. The goods could be consolidated in a relatively small volume. The technicians and forklift operators -- like Pharoah's pyramid architects -- could have been buried along with the goods. Saddam had the only key, and he's not talking. There are no seed cultures. (They'd require power supplies for controlled environments, and rotation of growth media.) There's no fissile material. (Gamma survey would find it despite shielding, and it there'd be a big, dirty production site somewhere ... US hasn't even figured out how to decontaminate its own WW II extraction facilities.)
Saddam slipped the goods across the border into Syria months ago. Unlikely from a number of perspectives, but plausible. Promoted by Israeli intel, which has its own agenda. Incompatible with the main corpus of prewar "solid intelligence", and suffers from most of the "vault thesis" plot spoilers.
Saddam brought a superpower down on his head rather than surrender these WMDs? Then he destroyed the same precious WMDs rather than use them against the superpower? As in the vault thesis, he does this without leaving major production-residue signatures. And ...Only a prize-winning, best-selling subject-matter specialist could get a piece like this printed in the Podunk Herald. Miller is a journalistic rock star -- deservedly so -- but she's stuck in the desert, holding the bag, waiting for the snipe, while a goddamn real biological terror -- SARS -- bounces around the globe. In short, this report walks like a fish, quacks like a fish, and smells like a fish.US intel was comprehensively wrong on every detail ... but coincidentally correct on the central premise ... but almost all of that evidence no longer exists. And ...
The story -- pre-cleared with the military -- reaches us through a chain of biased sources: a surprise witness (who tells us everything we want to hear, complete with an al Qaeda connection), one or more military intelligence operatives, and an embedded reporter who hasn't met the informant or seen any evidence, and who laid her reputational neck on the line with the WMD hawks a long way back.
On yesterday's Nightline, Ted Koppel spotted what may be a more promising explanatory trial balloon -- "all's fair in love and war". By this thesis, we were never serious about WMD. WMD was never anything more than a necessary selling tool for war. War was necessary and salutary as an "object lesson" to lesser beings, reminding them (for their own good) that the US is big and tough. Why now? "9/11 changed everything". Why Iraq? No special reason ... Iraq presented itself as an adversary of convenience. Koppel gathered unabashed supporting testimony from B-list neocon hawks, including former CIA Director Woolsey.
Posted by thorswitch at April 25, 2003 06:02 PM
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