I really wish we’d turned up a big cache of WMDs — chemical, biological, nuclear — in Iraq by now.
Because I’m sure they’re there. Hell, there’s not a government around (including the ones that opposed the war) who didn’t think Iraq had WMDs. They were all in favor of an ongoing inspections regime, remember? Not even Chirac could say, with a straight face, “No war. No sanctions. Iraq has no WMDs.”
There were tons of biowarfare and chemical materials known to be in Iraq when UNMOVIC was there. Iraq admitted it. They admitted it again in their grudging report to the UN in December. Except they claimed they’d destroyed it all. But they didn’t keep the receipts, and did it in secret, and couldn’t provide any proof of it.
Nobody, not even France or Russia or China, took a look at that, shrugged, and said that inspections were no longer necessary.
Iraq is the size of California.
Give me twelve years — hell, give me one year — and, even without military and a reign of terror and complete control over the territory — and I’ll bet you I could hide several semi-trucks, several tanker trucks, many tons of materials of various sorts somewhere in California, and it wouldn’t be found in a few weeks of sporadic searching. Even by an invading army. Perhaps especially by an invading army.
(How large of a force do we have in California, just in the northern part of the state, looking for marijuana farms? How many of them go undiscovered?)
I’ll even do it with satellites overhead. Heck, I’ll bet I could do it without resorting to smuggling any of it over the border into Oregon.
I wish it had been found already, some of it at least. I hope it is, soon. I hope it isn’t discovered when it starts leaking into the Tigris, or we start finding mysterious cancer clusters in isolated towns in Kurdistan, or when someone rediscovers an ancient ruin somewhere and suffers from “Saddam’s Curse.” Or when someone else, in Syria, or Saudi, or even Iran or Iraq, starts using them.
I hope. Because sooner or later they will come to light.
Don’t you think the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” has been watered down to the point of irrelevance? Seems to me WMD used to mean nuclear weapons. They can be launched from afar, and definitely cause “mass destruction.” Shouldn’t the others be called “weapons of mass panic” or something, especially without missiles to deliver them to targets?
I would take issue with your phrase “a few weeks of sporadic searching.” The inspectors were there for months, and the administration’s top objective in Iraq now is to find WMDs – they recently tripled the number of post-invasion inspectors, while simultaneously lowering expectations.
I guess I’m glad that you still think finding the “WMD” claimed by the administration and others is important. Because most people have moved on, either by saying nothing or saying something like, “It doesn’t matter, because they were either destroyed or moved. We know they had them before.” All this shifting rhetoric makes my head spin.
I agree that WMD has been overused. At the very least, there’s a big dif between nukes and gas or germ attacks.
The UN inspectors were at it for months, yes, but in a very slow, methodical, looking-at-the-big-sites way. They barely scratched the surface, which is part of what the pro-inspection folks were saying in quoting 6-9-12 months more of inspections. What they missed in that analysis was that it was clear that they were not getting anything but token cooperation from Saddam’s regime, which was essential in any inspection regime really working.
As far as US inspectors — they really have been in there only a few weeks now. Sites were being inspected in passing during the war, but the primary goal was … well, the war.
I think finding the WMD is important because we know they were there, and if they fall into the wrong hands (or simply leach into the soil), it’s a huge problem. As the sine qua non of justifying the Iraq invasion, I’m not so sure they’re as important. The crap we’ve been finding other than WMD almost seems to justify it in and of itself.
So you’re not skeptical at all of the administration’s case for massive amounts of weapons? And its attendant threat to world security?
I believe(d) it enough to see it as a legitimate causus belli.