DANCE OF THE WMD FAIRIES

Well, pretty much everybody, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, excepting Vice President Dick Cheney, now understands that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the US invaded. Of course the obscene irony in this is that President Bush's biggest reason for the invasion was to get those WMDs before Saddam could hand them over to terrorists. In other words, the Oval Office's justification for "preemptive war" turned out to be utterly false.

Of course, I and many others have been trumpeting this fact since well before the war began, but most Americans sneered at what they called "hatred" for our country. Whatever. We were absolutely right; they were dead wrong: hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqis are now dead for Bush's bogus justification, and people continue to die. And let's not forget the thousands of American wounded and maimed.

One of the things that made it clear to me that Iraq was not a threat to the US was how we handled North Korea. Iraq insisted, again and again, that they had no WMDs. North Korea, however, proudly proclaimed that they had nuclear weapons. Iraq gets invaded; North Korea gets diplomacy. That struck me as a wildly odd contradiction. Why would we treat a country that almost certainly had WMDs with kid gloves, while at the same time using shaky evidence to justify invading a country that may very well not have WMDs? The answer was clear to me: Iraq must not have WMDs--if they did, the US would have probably given them the North Korea treatment, that is, diplomacy.

The mainstream press is now looking into this.

Was Iraq the greatest threat?
4 other nations more advanced
in unconventional arms

From the New York Times via the Houston Chronicle:

The bluntly worded conclusion by the chief American arms inspector in Iraq, David Kay, that Saddam Hussein "got rid" of his unconventional weapons long before the Iraq invasion last year underscores a point that has become clear to intelligence experts in the past few months: President Bush moved first, and most decisively, against a country that posed a smaller proliferation risk than North Korea, Libya and Iran, or even one of America's allies, Pakistan.

While Kay's team has come up largely empty-handed so far, contributing to his decision to resign on Friday, a team of American experts visiting North Korea was shown what appeared to be at least a rudimentary ability to produce plutonium -- though they were not able to confirm that North Korea spent 2003 churning out new weapons.

I guess it's nice to be vindicated, but the situation is still quite grim. Click here for the rest of the article.

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