Speaking of WMD, deceit, and doubletalk

Say what you will about Tony Blair, he could give even the White "we never said 'imminent'" House lessons in slippery language. From AP, July 6:

Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq, but insisted the dictator had posed a threat to the world. ...

"I have to accept that we have not found them, that we may not find them," Blair told a committee of lawmakers Tuesday. "We do not know what has happened to them. They could have been removed, they could have been hidden, they could have been destroyed."

Blair rejected any suggestion that the stockpiles never existed and that Saddam had not been a danger to the world. ...

"I genuinely believe that those stockpiles of weapons were there," Blair added.

Uh-huh. Okay. They were there when? That's the operative but unspoken word. Without a when, the structure of Blair's argument is that you either must accept that the "threat" of banned Iraqi weapons was a valid reason to invade or you must argue that Saddam never had such weapons at any time in the past. That is, if Saddam Hussein had chemical and/or biological weapons in 1991, then despite 12 years of inspections, controls, destruction of facilities, sanctions, and the occasional bombing he still must have had them in early 2003. Of course, that's idiocy, and of course, Blair knows it's idiocy. But what it does is allow him to avoid saying that he was wrong.

There is a commission of inquiry that's supposed to issue a report on the matter of the Blair government's prewar intelligence on July 14. But if it's set up anything like the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly, I don't expect anything.

Footnote: White House mouthpiece Scott McClellan responded to Blair's comments by saying the search for weapons is not over.

"We know from the work of the Iraq Survey Group that Saddam Hussein's regime continued to have the intent and capability. ...

"Saddam Hussein's regime was a threat. The international community recognized his regime was a threat. So we want to let the Iraq Survey Group continue to do its work and see what they find,"

McClellan said.

My, how the mighty have fallen. From uranium ore from Niger, hundreds of these, thousands of gallons of that, and tons of the other, we have passed through "weapons of mass destruction-related activities" to "intent and capability," that is, from possession to attempts to daydreams.

By the way, I've know I've said this before, but I can't help noticing that if what the White House claims is true - that Saddam maintained the intent to get WMDs but didn't have them - doesn't that mean that sanctions worked exactly as they were intended to?

And one last thing here: Just when will the Iraq Survey Group finish its work? I can foresee a time years from now when they have searched every last rabbit hole in Iraq and found nothing, upon which they say "well, we can't rule out the possibility that the weapons were moved from A to B while we were looking at C. So we have to start over."