Just shaking my head

Some things go beyond my ability to be sarcastic and I wind up just shaking my head and smiling wryly. From AP for October 5:

The final report of the chief U.S. arms inspector for Iraq was expected to undercut a principal Bush administration rationale for removing Saddam Hussein, that Saddam's Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction.

In drafts, weapons hunter Charles Duelfer concluded Saddam's Iraq had no stockpiles of the banned weapons but said he found signs of idle programs that Saddam could have revived once international attention waned. ...

The White House maintained Duelfer's report will support its view on Iraq's prewar threat.

"The report will continue to show that he was a gathering threat that needed to be taken seriously, that it was a matter of time before he was going to begin pursuing those weapons of mass destruction," [White House spokesman Scott] McClellan said.

Oh, my word. First it was "he has weapons of mass destruction!" Then it was "he had weapons of mass destruction-related programs!" Now it's "he was going to begin weapons of mass destruction-related programs sometime in the future!" At the rate they're backtracking, in about two more years they'll be saying Saddam was the reincarnation of Gandhi.

Footnote One: The linked article has an interesting rundown on what WMDs US forces have actually found in Iraq:

- One artillery shell for delivering sarin, from Saddam's pre-1991 stockpile.

- One old artillery shell which might at one time have contained mustard agent.

- Two small rocket warheads that might once have contained sarin.

- Centrifuge parts buried in a former nuclear scientist's garden in Baghdad, from Saddam's pre-1991 nuclear program.

- One vial of what the article called live botulinum toxin, which had sat in a scientist's refrigerator since 1993. But according to David Kay,

[t]he botulinum was actually the bacteria, not the toxin, and was among a collection of "reference strains" of biological organisms that could not be used to produce biological warfare agents.

Footnote Two: In one of those idiotic, infuriating examples of an insistence on an artificial sort of "balance," the article ends with this sentence:

The Iraq Survey Group did not deal with whether Saddam's government had contacts with members of the al-Qaida network, a matter that remains subject to wide debate.

A complete non sequitur. It has no connection with the rest of the article. It was included simply and solely so that an article slapping the White House would be "balanced" by something at least somewhat favorable to it. A waste of space.

Indeed, worse than a waste of space: The sentence is really inane. There is no dispute whatsoever about whether Saddam Hussein's government had "contacts" with al-Qaeda. Of course it did! The question is, what did those "contacts" mean? The US has contacts with all sorts of people and groups and governments. We had contacts with the Palestinians. Does that mean we're supporting the intifada? We have contacts with North Korea. Does that mean we're cooperating with them on some nefarious scheme?

Did Iraq and al-Qaeda have "contacts," did they ever communicate with each other? Yes. Did they ever work together? Well, there's some indication they flirted briefly with the idea. A meeting was proposed. Did anything come of that? No. So did they ever work together? Well, again, there is some suggestion that Saddam may have provided some weapons training some time in the 1980s. Okay - but did they ever work together? Did they have, in the words of the 9/11 Commission, "a collaborative relationship?" Well, they, uh - no.

An inane waste of space.