The Independent’s Andrew Gumbel has a nice wrap-up on the current state of the Great Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction Hunt: America targeted 14,000 sites. So where are the weapons of mass destruction? The upshot: the WMDs aren’t there. Breathless newsbreaks from Bush’s Ministers of Information at Fox notwithstanding, there are no signs yet of anything other than the scattered debris of the pre-Gulf War I weapons program.

With rumors having surfaced (apparently courtesy the straight shooters in the Israeli intelligence community) that the WMDs have in fact been spirited away to Syria, Gumbel wonders how long it will be before this is trotted out as the justification for the next invasion:

Disarmament experts do not give the claim much credence. After all, any suspicious convoy or mobile laboratory would almost certainly be spotted by US planes or spy satellites and bombed long before it reached Syria.

But the notion does provide the hawks in Washington with a compelling plot device not unlike the McGuffin factor in Alfred Hitchcock’s films – a catalyst that may or may not have significance in itself but that gets the suspense going and keeps the story rolling.

If the Bush administration should ever seek to turn its military wrath on Damascus, the weapons of mass destruction it is failing to find in Iraq might just provide the excuse once again.

I guess it’s a good thing my tiny little mind couldn’t keep track of what our actual stated reason for going to war was during those tumultuous days leading up to the invasion. Because if I had been able to keep track of that, I’d probably be getting pretty annoyed by now, as it becomes increasingly clear that the whole war was predicated on a lie.

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, April 13th, 2003 at 8:33 am and is filed under war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.