Too Much To Dream

Bombs hideaway

I was thinking about WMDs (no -- really!) and then this post at Mr. Helpful's blog caused some of the random thoughts I had coalesce into something more or less coherent, considering my lack of expertise in this area and in all areas military, strategic, and political. Well, I guess that is why he is Mr. Helpful.

Like many people, Mr. Helpful is antsy about the US finding the big bombs and stuff. But -- I am not going to go on here about the size of the country and so forth -- it has been done to death. On the other hand, I think a lot of people are losing sight of the fact that this war was touted as a "pre-emptive" war. In fact, that was one of the real big bitches against it. "'Pre-emptive'!" a lot of critics shrieked. "Who does Dubya think he is -- God? Our parents?" That second criteria being even more evil than the first. But I am getting off the track here.

The idea that we were invading Iraq to prevent Saddam from developing/assembling an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that he was specifically directed not to do by the sacred overlords of the United Nations (whom everyone pays lipservice to but no one obeys) was one of the criticisms against the war -- the idea that it was presumptuous, that we had no right, and so on. I am not going to go into the social ramifications of that attitude tonight. I am going to address the idea that the critics (I'd call them the antiwar contingent, but they are not all of that, nor are they wholly of the left) have now dropped that idea -- a sensible tactic, since the invasion is now a moot point -- and are now into the idea that we must now find WMDs inside Iraq to justify the war. I have actually even seen it postulated (see the comments) that the lack of such WMDs are grounds of impeachment of President Bush. Of course that idea is laughable on its face.

But to find WMDs -- there is the rub. Where are we to begin? Hussein had a whole country, of some size, to play with, for at least a dozen years. In Mr. Helpful's comments I said (in some less detail) that if I were an Evil Overlord like Saddam Hussein, and my most hated enemy was simultaneously massing armed forces off my borders while talking the aggressive talk to the world concerning moi (l'état, c'est moi), and had I already had assembled at least a small arsenal -- even one nuclear warhead -- of WMDs, I would not have pussyfooted around and waited and played with Hans Blix's head the way he did. Rather, I would have wasted no time in launching a warhead containing some deadly agent -- plutonium, smallpox, poisonous gas, whatever -- at some nearby place; Kuwait, most likely. (And before any of you even think of dragging out that old dead horse about Arab solidarity or any such nonsense please remember that Saddam Hussein has shown no more compassion or caring for his fellow actual Arab brother than he has for the Kurdish women and children he had gassed just so he could make sure his human spray killed people dead like the label said. He was in all ways a traditional Arab chieftain -- a thug to whom his underlings were no more than cannon fodder when the chips were down, up, or in a drawer.)

If I were an Evil Overlord like Saddam, I'd have nuked Kuwait City the moment I heard the war talk start. Saddam was delusional and evil, but he wasn't entirely stupid. He knew as well as I, a part-time auto insurance agent, that once you showed the world that you have the Bomb, you were guaranteed the kid glove treatment for life. Look at North Korea.

So no, I don't think we are going to find any WMDs. I think that we are going to find parts of WMDs. I think that we are going to find a stash of cesium some-number here, a crate of vials of anthrax there. I think we are going to find "baby milk" factories with warehouses full of mysterious metal tubes that are rather larger than even elephant baby bottles; I think that we are going to find caves with partly assembled rocket launchers that were only missing the pertinent part to be completed. And that is going to be only the tip of the iceberg. And we will find that certain countries (whose names begin with F, G, and R) were in it up to their elbows. In fact, I think that we have started to find these things out, but that they are being kept until a really devastating dossier of evidence has been developed. That seems to be the Dubya methodology.

I will say this. I think that the UN inspector shenanigans helped somewhat. I think that all that nonsense distracted Hussein enough, and scared enough potential sellers of deadly shtuff, that he was prevented from realizing his wet dream of building a nuclear weapon. (I think he fell back on poison gas as a sloppy second, but the big bangflash nukes were his one true desire.) So I think they were useful idiots in this endeavor. Or were they? Sometimes I wonder if UN incompetence and intransigence is entirely the truth of the matter. Maybe all of this -- the posturing of Chirac, the UN's maneuverings, the blatherings of Schroeder (anyone else have visions of some short blond kid at the piano every time his name is mentioned?), the treachery and the buffoonery -- was all an elaborate ruse, a ruse pulled on Saddam Hussein. Then again, I am not so sure pols are that smart -- my intellectual (now there's a word I'd like to steal back, if I wasn't so sure it wasn't as gutted as a Honda Prelude that's been in the chop shop for a month) side rises up against the notion that there wasn't a lot of dumb luck on our side this time, and we just happened to catch the Euroleaders and the Arabs in a particularly stupid part of their career.

Posted by Andrea Harris at May 4, 2003 03:56 AM