Guns and Butter Blog

[Update] Michelle Malkin confirms that I was right all along... nearly 2 years later.

[Original Entry]

Note: I wrote the following op-ed in late May, 2004. At that time most media outlets were in a hysteria about Bush administration's "lies" about the pre-war WMD intelligence. I could not find an outlet interested in publishing it. But in light of a number of recent reports that confirm much of what the Bush administration asserted, I dug it out for the benefit of the "Guns and Butter Blog" readers.

I should also note that since then the coalition forces in Iraq discovered dozens of shells containing chemical agents that Iraq was not supposed to possess under UN resolutions. It is suspected that more stockpiles of such weapons will be discovered in the future as Saddam Hussein failed to account for some 550 shells and 450 aerial bombs containing chemcial agents right up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. This represents about 80 tons of missing weapons of mass destruction. When more discoveries are made, the "mainstream" media will, of course, continue to treat such news as non-events. James J. Na

"No WMD": The Myth That Won't Die

The now familiar anti-war refrain, perpetuated by the media, goes "there is no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." The implication is that the Bush administration put forth a false, or worse, fabricated, justification for going to war against the Saddam Hussein regime, and that it is belatedly changing the rationale for war from WMD to democratization of Iraq.

It is, simply put, a myth that will not die. Because those in the media have repeated it with enough persistence, the myth has firmly entered our consciousness and is now widely accepted as gospel truth.

In reality, President Bush offered the following reasons in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 12, 2002 and in the accompanying document titled "A Decade of Deception and Defiance: Saddam Hussein's Defiance of the United Nations":

1. Saddam Hussein's defiance of United Nations resolutions, including violations of the Gulf War ceasefire agreement.
2. His development of weapons of mass destruction.
3. His repression of the Iraq people.
4. His support for international terrorism, including an attempt to assassinate a former US president by the Iraqi intelligence service, and the support for Mujehedin el-Khalq, PLF and Abu Nidal terrorist organization.
5. His refusal to account for Gulf War prisoners.
6. His refusal to return property stolen by Iraqi forces.
7. His efforts to circumvent economic sanctions.

In other words, Saddam Hussein's development of WMD was one of several serious reasons why the president decided to act. Setting aside the issue of the WMD, the validity of the other reasons is not in doubt today, and one is not likely to find anyone in the media who say otherwise.

But what about the WMD issue? Didn't David Kay testify that "we were all wrong" about the Iraqi WMD program? That the pre-war intelligence was inaccurate? Pre-war intelligence is, by nature, always inaccurate. For example, when the allies surveyed the German atomic weapons program after World War II, they were relieved to find that it was considerably less advanced than originally estimated by pre-war intelligence. Nonetheless, there was no doubt just what kind of threat that atomic weapons program posed to the United States. It was considered a significant achievement that the Nazi regime was toppled before its atomic weapons program became an imminent threat.

Contrary to the persistent myth of "no evidence," Kay stated that "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations." He also went on to say that the search has been hampered by "extensive concealment efforts" and "systematic sanitization" of evidence by Saddam's henchmen before, during and even after Operation Iraqi Freedom. A further obstacle to discovery has been the fact that, again in Kay's words, "WMD weapons or material... can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two car garage" in a country as large as California.

In recent weeks, two disturbing episodes have surfaced that add weight to the evidence of Iraqi WMD program. In April, Jordanian authorities broke up an effort by terrorists to kill up to 80,000 people with chemical agents, suspected to have originated from Syria. As Kay stated in an interview "a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program.”

Furthermore, the coalition forces recently discovered an Iraqi 155 mm shell containing sarin, a nerve agent, in a roadside bomb. They also found a weapon containing mustard gas, another chemical agent. Both discoveries have been confirmed in lab tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG), which is responsible for finding Iraqi WMD. Yet Hans Blix incredulously continues to claim that this "is not a sign that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed WMD" and "did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles" of such weapons. In light of the damning evidence, the bar has apparently risen from stockpiles of WMD to "large" stockpiles.

The media have treated these significant discoveries as non-events, and continue to perpetuate the myth that there is "no evidence" of WMD and that the WMD issue was the sole -- fabricated -- reason we went to war. Didn't the propaganda minister of a totalitarian regime once say that a lie repeated often enough becomes truth?