Wednesday, January 12, 2005

All For Nothing, Nothing For All
It's official--we found bupkus in terms of substantive weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq:

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.
[...]
Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official said that possibility is very small.


Remember, the reconstitution of the nuclear program ("we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"-Condi) and the veritable stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons ("we know where they are"-Dick) was an imminent crisis that had to be addressed back in 2002/2003 when all the Chicken Little Hawks were beating their breasts for war. But we got it wrong. For this we've suffered over 1,000 American deaths (and the contributions of hundreds of lives from the Coalition of the Willing) and thousands upon thousands more casualties.


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