BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
If Saddam didn't have WMDs, why
didn't he prove it? We should all be outraged by the Bush
administration's untruths as to whether Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction. Saddam's alleged chemical, biological, and nascent
nuclear capabilities were, after all, the principal argument offered
by the White House for going to war in the first place.
Still, this is a bit more
complicated than some elements of the antiwar left would have it.
Last night, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff appeared on
The
David Brudnoy Show, on
WBZ Radio (AM 1030), to talk about his
latest article, regarding
the way US officials bent intelligence to suit their needs. That's
how the phony stories about the aluminum tubes and the uranium from
Niger made their way into the public consciousness.
New York Times columnist
Paul
Krugman today goes hyperbolic,
writing, "The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat.
If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the
worst scandal in American political history -- worse than Watergate,
worse than Iran-contra."
I usually am delighted with
Krugman's heated Bush-whacking. But, in this case, he and other
critics are forgetting about one key fact. Last December, Iraq
submitted a
12,200-page, UN-mandated report
on its weapons program that chief weapons inspector Hans Blix
denounced as worthless.
Weapons inspectors knew for a fact
that Saddam had an active program for producing WMDs at one time.
Yet, when faced with invasion and overthrow, Saddam refused to say
whether he still had those weapons -- or, if he didn't, what he had
done with them. Nor was he particularly cooperative with Blix and
nuclear-weapons inspector Mohammed ElBareidi.
Thus, if Iraq didn't have WMDs,
Saddam refused to take the opportunity to prove it and thus stave off
the end of his brutal, bloody regime.
President Bush now has a chaotic
mess on his hands -- a mess that was predicted by those of us who
opposed going to war without an explicit UN mandate.
Nevertheless, given that it now
seems clear that Iraq's WMD capability was, at the very least,
nowhere near as great as the White House had claimed, it is a mystery
as to why Saddam didn't do more to save his worthless, evil
ass.
posted at 9:33 AM |
comment or permalink
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
