The NYTimes reports today on a small faction of folks, ordinary citizens like you and I, who are convinced that the case for the existence of WMDs in Iraq can still be made.
The United States government abandoned the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq long ago. But Dave Gaubatz has never given up.
Mr. Gaubatz, an earnest, Arabic-speaking investigator who spent the first months of the war as an Air Force civilian in southern Iraq, has said he has identified four sites where residents said chemical weapons were buried in concrete bunkers.
The sites were never searched, he said, and he is not going to let anyone forget it.
"I just don’t want the weapons to fall into the wrong hands," Mr. Gaubatz, of Denton, Tex., said.
Rick Santorum’s on board. I love to pick on Rick:
The proponents include some members of Congress. Two Republicans, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania held a news conference on Wednesday to announce that, as Mr. Santorum put it, "We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
American intelligence officials hastily scheduled a background briefing for the news media on Thursday to clarify that. Hoekstra and Mr. Santorum were referring to an Army report that described roughly 500 munitions containing "degraded" mustard or sarin gas, all manufactured before the 1991 gulf war and found scattered through Iraq since 2003.
Such shells had previously been reported and do not change the government conclusion, the officials said.
The absurdity here, of course, is that the entire point of the war was preemptive action against a supposedly hostile nation. The existence of scattered munitions does nothing to support the Bush Administration’s reasoning for this petroleum war. In his book State of War, NYTimes reporter James Risen writes about the wishful WMD thinking of the pre-war Administration. According to Risen, this was the CIA’s response to their informants:
The CIA man smiled, nodded, and left. Sawsan Alhaddad’s debriefing report was filed along with all the others from the family members who had agreed to return to Baghdad to contact Iraqi weapons scientists.
All of them-some thirty-had said the same thing. They all reported to the CIA that the scientists had said that Iraq’s programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned. [The] program to use family members to contact dozens of Iraqi scientists had garnered remarkable results and given the CIA an accurate assessment of the abandoned state of Iraq’s weapons programs months before the US invasion in March 2003. (p. 105-6)
Even if WMDs were floating around Iraq like ghosts of Gulf Wars past, without the infrastructure necessary to launch an attack, well…so what?
A few more observations from the article:
Mr. Hoekstra "has said on many occasions that we need to know what happened to Saddam’s W.M.D.," his spokesman, Jamal Ware, said. Mr. Hoekstra "is determined to make sure that we get the postwar intelligence right," Mr. Ware added.
Get the postwar intelligence right? Dude, not sure if you know about this, but the war’s been going on for 3 years. The President landed on the aircraft, civil war has erupted, and more people are dying in the region from terrorism than before the war. Wait a minute, why the hell is the Iraq War being run in reverse? I remember very distinctly a solid rule of war I learned from my 9th grade social studies class: you’d better have a damn good reason to go to fight before you send your own soldiers to die, and I know that Rep. Hoekstra has completed the 9th grade. It’s preposterous that people are still standing up to defend this Administration of cowards and thugs.
Finally, it seems from the following statement that Dave Gaubatz, the main guy in this revived search for WMDs, a guy who spent 23 years in the Air Force and was an investigator for the retailer Target, is really searching for assurance that his country didn’t lie to him in the pre-war lead-up, as if such a thing were possible.
"I didn’t imagine it would be a battle to get them to search," he said. "One of the primary reasons for going into combat was the W.M.D."
Give it up, Dave. Your country lied to you and everyone else in the world. I know, it’s like the time you found out Santa isn’t real and that mommy works at a place with lots of shiny silver poles called Jugs n’ Things.
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