WMD and Santa Claus

It no longer surprises me that there are people who still deny the Holocaust. For some inexplicable reason, human beings have an innate tendency to cling to disproven notions as gospel truth, often because of some crap they read on the internet.

Take this guy for example. We’ll call him Ostrich Syndrome. Despite the fact that the Administration long ago gave up on this point, along with the Republican apparatus and the credible conservative news media, Ostrich Syndrome believes that those weapons of mass destruction are still hiding in Iraq somewhere.

Now even those who made the mistake of supporting the war without first allowing the weapons inspectors to do their jobs know that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. What used to be an issue of debate is now stale fodder for standup comics and Will & Grace episodes. It’s a farce. The only real issue is whether or not the powers that be either knew or should have known that this was the case.

There is ample evidence out there. Take for example the revelation by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that weapons of mass destruction were simply a pretense for invasion—"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on weapons of mass destruction because it was the one issue everyone could agree on” (Vanity Fair magazine, May 2003). In truth, by landing American troops in Iraq, we had an alternative location for American military presence and would no longer need to station ourselves in Saudi Arabia (“Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil,” stated on June 1, 2003). But of course, if they’d gone to the American people with that, they might not have gotten the public support he’d needed. Option B is to scare the living crap out of people by telling them that their lives depend upon it. Enter weapons of mass destruction.

Nonetheless, despite everyone having gone home from the scavenger hunt, Ostrich Syndrome believes that those WMD are still out there hiding in Iraq and that their presence is ample justification for violating international law and preemptively invading a foreign nation. His evidence? For starters, a book review on the CIA’s web site. A gentleman named Mahdi Obeidi is a former Iraqi scientist who defected to the US. He discusses how he was instructed to bury a gas centrifuge in his garden by Iraqi authorities and details life in the WMD department.

There are just a few problems here. First, Ostrich Syndrome is making the same mistake that CIA made before all of this started in the first place. Let’s say that you are a scientist working in Iraq. Maybe even a scientist who is a part of a chemical weapons program under the Hussein regime. Chances are pretty good that you don’t want to be in Iraq. But if you try defecting to a western nation to seek asylum, then you’re going to need to ensure your value to that nation. As such a scientist, the best way to do that is to tell the intelligence community exactly what they want to hear about your home country. Fib a little. Stretch some truths. A perfect example is a scientist that the CIA codenamed “Screwball” (telling, isn’t it?). Screwball’s intel was the basis for much of Colin Powell’s famous speech at the UN detailing what America knew about Saddam’s weapons program, much of which we now know to be false. Apparently at the time, there were also multiple warnings to the administration and CIA that Screwball was not only making things up, but legally insane. The substance sounded good, though, so we just went with it.

Mahdi is one of these truth-stretching defector fellows. How do we know? Because when others checked on the facts his book, they found that he made up many of the relevant individuals in it. They plain never existed. Funny how CIA doesn’t mention that in the book review.

But let’s pretend for a moment that Ostrich Syndrome is right and that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Let’s even pretend for a moment that al Qaeda and the Hussein regime, sworn enemies of one another, were actually in cahoots (hey, they’re all Muslims right?). Is a war really the way to remedy the situation? The issue of an Iraqi invasion started getting tossed around right after Afghanistan. The tanks started rolling in March 2003 after we’d been amassing troops in Kuwait for quite some time. If Saddam Hussein were really going to take his WMD and hand it over to a terrorist organization of global reach, don’t you think that maybe he would have done it during that year-and-a-half window of opportunity? If I can figure this out, then I’m sure someone in the Pentagon can…and did. It only supports the contention that we never invaded for this reason in the first place and that the weapons probably weren’t there.

So why didn’t Saddam let us trek around his country looking for them for so long? Because it made strategic sense not to. As much as we like to complain about them, sanctions were effective at keeping most of what he needed out of the country. Even if he wanted to support a WMD program, it is unlikely that Saddam could have bankrolled it. That would help explain why we found a lot of potential for a WMD program, but no WMDs. Nonetheless, we’re not dealing with a stable guy here. He fears Iran and he fears us. Much like North Korea today, he believed he needed a deterrent. It made much more sense fiscally and strategically to publicly deny having WMD while giving the world strong hints that he did. That way, the belief that you have chem/bio weapons serves as a deterrent against invasion by your enemies and in the mean time, you can spend money elsewhere. All you have to do is take small steps to keep up the impression that you do have a program. This includes kicking out the people who are searching your country for WMD. Once it became apparent that the US was going to invade unless they let in the inspectors, the strategy had to change. Much to our surprise (and chagrin) he let the inspectors in. They didn’t find anything. We invaded anyway. Then we didn’t find anything.

Anyway, the rest of us have moved from the question of whether there were weapons of mass destruction to how we screwed up our intelligence so badly. Nonetheless, Ostrich Syndrome sticks to his tired contentions that they’re still out there. I’ve no doubt this kid argued with his parents for weeks when they told him that there was no Santa. I also have no doubt that little inconveniences like facts will never be enough to deter him in his erroneous beliefs…