[« Great days in history:] [Well, once again I fail.... »]
10/06/2004: It's official: Bush was full of shit (big surprise, eh?)
Over at dKos Meteor Blades says it nicely:
Around mid-April, 2003, some of us started wondering aloud where the damned WMDs were. We'd been promised a big warehouse full of sarin or anthrax spores or 10 kiloton atomic warheads. But nothing. Even Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who had been enhancing her rep with fat "scoops" about Saddam's WMDs for the previous 18 months started changing her tune.Now, if there were any justice, we'd turn Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, and a few others to be tried (and, if we were lucky, convicted and then hung by the neck until dead) for their war crimes. But there ain't any justice.
"Only" 171 Coalition fighters had been killed so far, but we were still curious as to why these lives had been expended if no evidence was being uncovered regarding the primary rationale for their being sent to Iraq in the first place.
All it took to restore our confidence in the Bush Administration's casus belli in those heady days just before "Mission Accomplished" was a visit to conservative publications and blogs. Querulous leftists were informed in those venues that all our unpatriotic doubts would soon be dispelled. And wouldn't we look silly then? April ended, then May.
Next thing we knew, David Kay was the man of the hour, leading the 1200-person Iraq Survey Group for what he said would soon be a "surprising" discovery, a "mind-boggling" find. The ISG's interim report in October contained neither.
A few months later, with 661 Coalition fighters dead, Kay was telling the Bush Administration it should admit its "mistake" about the existence of WMDs in Iraq. Which, of course, it did not.
Now, there are 1202 Coalition fighters, at least 13,000 Iraqi civilians and thousands of Iraqi soldiers dead, and, according to the final report of the ISG, Saddam had no WMDs, or any concrete plans to develop them. Indeed, Iraq represented a "diminishing" threat when it was invaded by the United States.
...
Of course, as we were long ago told by Paul Wolfowitz, WMDs were chosen as a casus belli not because they represented a real threat but for "bureaucratic reasons." In other words, they knew they could simultaneously enrage and scare the shit out of the American people by saying that Iraq was joined at the hip with al Qaeda, and the next 9/11 might be a Saddam/Osama nuke in Seattle or a smallpox outbreak in Los Angeles.
The ISG report should provide great comfort to the families of soldiers and Marines returning lifeless to Dover Air Force Base.
Len on 10.06.04 @ 11:52 AM CST
