The conservative/pro-war side of the commentariat and the blogosphere has been disappointingly silent in dealing with the absence of findings of weapons of mass destruction. It’s understandable; the allies haven’t found what we expected them to find, and nobody wants to concede anything yet if we might learn a more favorable truth later.
I feel a long post on this coming on. For now, Kathleen Parker, one of the wisest and most temperate of conservative pundits, has some thoughts on the subject.
3 thoughts on “WMD or Not WMD?”
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I’m of many minds about this.
Foremost, we need to hold our intelligence community accountable. If Gen. Powell reared up before the UN and made some grotesque misstatements about Iraq’s weapons then that is bad news forsooth. If our intelligence on this subject was glaringly wanting then we are REALLY hanging out there on some important subjects.
But I have to laugh at the hard left’s effort to decry the Iraq campaign as fundamentally flawed because of the absence, so far, of any substantial discoveries. For years, decades even, everyone on all sides of this equation has taken Iraq’s WMDs as a given. Bill Clinton premised the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 on the need to eliminate Iraq’s weapons systems. Jacques Chirac, Scott Ritter, everybody everywhere believed Saddam had them. Scores of Iraqi defectors talked about them.
Plus (and this is really where I hang my hat) — it always seemed to me that the whole point of this effort was to keep Iraq from finishing its race to build a nuclear weapon. That was the worst case scenario that Ken Pollack talked about in The Threatening Storm, the tool that the world simply could not permit Saddam to have.
The conservative/pro-war side of the commentariat and the blogosphere has been disappointingly silent in dealing with the absence of findings of weapons of mass destruction.
Maybe so in general. But not everyone. See Joshua Claybourn (he has written more posts along these same lines).
Where have all the weapons gone?
“So what about those Weapons of Mass Destruction, huh?” Kathleen Parker at Town Hall ponders the question, and thinks perhaps