Iraqi WMD Are Officially Non-Existent
Attention wingers: This is the point where my (and a lot of other people’s) assertions, back in the spring of 2003, that Saddam did not, in fact, have WMD, and your response that well, we’d just have to wait and see, gets (briefly) resurrected for an accounting. The Iraq Survey Group, the official operation charged with finding said WMD, has been quietly disbanded. The weapons hunters from the CIA are back home in Virginia, and the preliminary report from Charles Duelfer of a few months ago, in which he said that nope, there weren’t any WMD, is going to become the official report. Anyway, from the WaPo: Search for banned arms in Iraq ended last month.
The right-wing webloggers are no doubt taking their cue from their fellow travellers in the echo chamber and in the Bush administration itself, and simply ignoring this. WMD? What WMD? Oh, those WMD. Well, of course we know there weren’t any. Everybody knows that. We’ve known that for quite some time. It was Bill Clinton who said they were there to begin with, you know, and frankly, we always had our doubts.
I’m reminded of the comment by actress Gemma Jones as Mrs. Dashwood in the 1995 Sense and Sensibility, the one for which Emma Thompson won her richly deserved Best Adapated Screenplay Oscar: “He is certainly not so dashing as Willoughby. But he has a far more pleasing countenance. There was, at times, if you’ll remember, something in Willoughby’s eyes that I did not like.”
We who displayed greater sensibility back in the day about Iraq’s WMD are hereby taking a moment to smile to ourselves, before returning to our needlework.
January 15th, 2005 at 1:22 am
liberal fool
January 15th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
We were supposed to be saving the world from WMD (none found) and we were told we’d be welcomed as saviors from Saddam (didn’t happen). What, then, has NOT been a lie from the Bush government?
Why is the resistance growing in popular support among both Shiite and Sunni Muslims everywhere? Because of the stupid policies of George W. Bush, that’s why. Can anyone think of a way to make more enemies? Short of attacking additional innocent countries, we can’t.
January 24th, 2005 at 9:56 am
welcomed as saviors from saddam? wha? who said that? you’re calling US stupid?
January 24th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
Not saying US is stupid. Just the percentage who voted for bush, and this administration.
” we were told we’d be welcomed as saviors from Saddam ”
Chalabi said it and idiots believed it
As the Bush officials stoked the war flames, for several convergent reasons, Chalabi played a key role. He found defectors who affirmed suspicions that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction. He assured Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney that the Iraqi people would greet American liberators with flowers; that his militia, the Free Iraqi Fighters, would restore order; and that, after a few months, the vast majority of U.S. troops could go home, leaving behind a small, inconspicuous force—25,000 to 50,000 soldiers—at bases to be set up well outside the cities. The new Chalabi government would then be a vehicle for economic modernization, Western-style democracy, and—by the force of its example—the transformation of the entire Middle East.
Of course, it didn’t turn out that way. The only surprise is that people in positions of vast responsibility thought it would.