Just askin'

From the New York Times we get the shocking - shocking! - news that

[a] new report on Iraq's illicit weapons program is expected to conclude that Saddam Hussein's government had a clear intent to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons if United Nations sanctions were lifted, government officials said Thursday. But, like earlier reports, it finds no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year, the officials said.

The most specific evidence of an illicit weapons program, the officials said, has been uncovered in clandestine labs operated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, which could have produced small quantities of lethal chemical and biological agents, though probably for use in assassinations, not to inflict mass casualties.

Well, flaming fat duh!

Now, I of course have no desire whatsoever to cast aspersions on either the efforts of our intelligence services or the devoted patriots now staffing the White House, so I'll leave aside the fact that they are either the scummiest liars or the stupidest, blindest, most ideologically-straightjacketed jackasses ever to disgrace their offices, and I'll address this to the rest of our public officials, all of the major media, and frankly a good portion of the American left: Why the hell didn't you know this from the start?

This report tells us nothing - nothing - that was not already obvious before the spring of 2003. Don't believe me? I wrote this editorial on March 6, 2003:

Before we go to war on Iraq, there's a question about its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that needs to be answered:

What weapons of mass destruction?

Seriously. What weapons? Where? For months, the phrase "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" has been hypnotically chanted by the White House as if their current existence was unquestioned and unquestionable. Our largely supine "free press" fell in line, repeating the administration's mantra without question, analysis, or even passing comment. It's likely that most Americans, even those most strongly opposed to the coming war, believe Iraq has such weapons in massive quantities.

So where are they? Months of effort, hundreds of inspections at hundreds of sites, have turned up, for all practical purposes, zilch. The only substantive issue has been the Al Samoud 2 missile, which technically violates the UN arms control regime because in 13 of 40 test flights it went further than the 150 kilometer limit. (Which the inspectors knew because the Iraqis told them.) So where is all the rest of the stuff? Where are the tons of chemical and biological weapons?

"Hidden," the Bush team tells us. But not, supposedly, hidden so well that we couldn't find them: For months, the administration insisted it knew from intelligence reports exactly where those weapons were, what they were, and in what quantities.

This is the same sort of intelligence, no doubt, that during Gulf War I identified a civilian bomb shelter in Baghdad as a military command post and incinerated it - and in following years leveled a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan it wrongly labeled a chemical weapons factory, bombed a "vital military site" during the Kosovo campaign that turned out to be the Chinese Embassy, and blasted a wedding party in Afghanistan it had decided was a gathering of al-Qaeda terrorists. (None of these, let it be emphasized, were heat-of-battle decisions; all resulted from calm analysis.)

Our "intelligence" in this case has proved no better. When the White House finally started sharing information with UN inspectors, the result was a big fat goose egg. UN arms inspectors privately complain that US intelligence has sent them on wild-goose chases that have produced "nothing." One source referred to US-supplied intelligence as "garbage."

US claims that Iraq was building missiles with a range of 600 miles and had hidden "a few dozen" Scuds after the first Gulf War proved equally baseless. When UN inspectors checked the sites identified by the US, they again found nothing.

It got so bad that when Colin Powell made his presentation to the Security Council, he was reduced to showing pictures of a site he said had been sanitized by Iraqis before inspectors arrived. That is, it wasn't "this is where weapons are," it was "well, this is where they USED to be." I recall a old true story of two teenagers charged with possession of marijuana with intent to sell. When the judge in the case noted that they'd been found with only about 1/10 of an ounce of the stuff, the arresting officer testified that was because the boys had "smoked all the rest" before police got there. (Significantly, when Hans Blix made his presentation and noted that what Powell called evidence of deception could just as easily have been routine activity, Powell had to agree.)

The bottom line here is, contrary to the White House and the media, the inspections are not a matter of "disarming" Iraq but of seeing if Iraq has disarmed, the very non-trivial difference being that the former assumes the weapons do exist (thus serving as a justification for war) and the latter doesn't. By all available evidence, Iraq's WMD program has been effectively dismantled. Unhappily, unwillingly, and grudgingly dismantled, but dismantled nonetheless.

One final note: According to "The Independent" newspaper (London, UK) of February 16, experts at the UK's Ministry of Defense have repeatedly warned their American counterparts that the chemical weapons quaintly and misleadingly named "calmatives" which they plan to use in Iraq violate both the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention and the 1928 Geneva Protocol.

Ah, so that's where some of those illegal chemical weapons are.

And a month before that, I made the same argument in a private email in which I also said this:

Do I think it possible that Iraq has some small quantities of chemical and/or biological weapons stashed away in the hope that maybe sometime in the future the program could be restarted? Yeah, I certainly can buy that.

So I knew basically exactly what this report concludes more than 18 months ago. Dammit, if I could figure that out, why the hell couldn't the rest of you?

And yes, that includes you, John Kerry. I've already said - more than once - that if I was in a tossup state I would swallow my doubts and a fair portion of my self-respect and vote for you. But if you expect me to put forth any effort on your behalf, you had better be able to give me a damn good answer to that question.