NY Times removes head from buttocks

Glory be. The mighty New York Times has finally gotten wind of the fact that Iraq hasn’t had Ws-o’-MD or programs to produce them since the original Gulf war. All it took was the guy running the search quitting and saying so.

David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year.

The Times is still weasling around here a bit, though, because what Kay actually said was:

“I don’t think they existed[.] What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don’t think there was a large-scale production program in the ‘90s[.]”

No weapons, no programs, nothing. Remember: I’m not saying that. The guy Bush appointed to find the weapons is saying that. And quitting, because he didn’t find any.

So once again, war apologists, riddle me this. We invaded a country that possessed neither WMD nor active WMD programs. We have so far spent over 100 billion dollars on this invasion. We have suffered 10,000 troops incapacitated or wounded on top of 500 dead, and will have 100,000 or more pinned down in a guerrilla war for who knows how long. We’ve reduced our military’s power, effectiveness, and flexibility for years to come, without eliminating a serious threat—because there was no serious threat posed by the country we invaded.

Please don’t mention the fact that Saddam is a big fucking jerk; everybody knows that and it’s completely beside the point. There are a whole lot of big fucking jerks running countries out there, many of whom are (directly or indirectly) culpable in so much more human suffering than Saddam that they are not even going to be in the same circle of Hell when they all get there. At least one of them also has, or is very close to having, nuclear weapons.

If the latent threat posed by North Korea were to flare up, our ability to deal with it would be hampered by the fact that 100,000 of the people who we might need to do the dealing are in Baghdad and can’t leave.

So then the riddle. If the Iraq war did not eliminate a threat consonant with its costs and risks, how did it make us more safe?

Filed under: politics/war