MidEast Report

WMD FOUND IN IRAQ! (not quite)
Writing on NRO's "the Corner", Jonah Goldberg has this to say:

"Don't pop the champagne quite yet, but this story certainly could use some wider play:

New evidence out of Iraq suggests that the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is having better success than is being reported. Key assertions by the intelligence community that were widely judged in the media and by critics of President George W. Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all. But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.

In virtually every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.

The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight. "There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."

Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner. The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.....

Pop the champagne? Uh, sorry. If you read the whole article, not that you have to, given that the excerpt above pretty neatly contradicts itself, you'll see that this is much of the same old BS on a new shovel. Despite what the article claims, WMD have not been found. What has been found is evidence that Saddam was intent on obtaining weapons in the future, and that he was in material breach of various UN resolutions regarding the capability of his missile arsenal. Thing is, I don't know of anybody who is claiming those things weren't so. We all knew that Saddam was in material breach, and that he probably wanted to develop WMD in the future. But the President rested his case for invasion, invasion now, on the argument that Saddam currently posessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, not that Saddam wanted to get them later, but that Saddam had them now, and that this required the U.S. to act, rather than to wait.

Additionally, if WMD had, in fact, been found in Iraq, don't you think we'd be hearing about it in a breathless press conference from the White House, rather than from an obscure right-wing website?

posted by Matt Duss @ 12:03 PM