STILL SEARCHING FOR THE WMD….As the search for WMD in Iraq starts to look more and more fruitless, I guess it makes sense that war supporters should start floating their explanations for the missing weapons to a limited audience ? you know, just in case they need them later. Think of it as a sort of market test to figure out which ones work the best. There are already two standard issue excuses, of course: (a) it was really a war of liberation, and (b) all the WMD got spirited away to Syria before the war started.
But now the stories are starting to get more baroque. Jim Lacey suggests today in NRO that in fact there wasn’t any WMD, but Saddam himself was a dupe of his own underlings:
What was in it for Saddam’s minions, including his sons, if they were to scrape up the billions of dollars needed to start and maintain a WMD program? All such a program did, from their perspective, is drain off funds they needed for other projects, and draw the unwanted attention of bombers and cruise missiles. In their corrupt minds, a new “love palace” would always be a priority over a WMD site that was likely to be turned into dust as soon as it was discovered. If they shortchanged Saddam on a palace or his Babylon reconstruction there was a strong chance he might notice. However, it would be easy enough to hide that he did not have a WMD program.
Saddam was unlikely to be able to tell the difference between nuclear-grade graphite and pencil lead. What are the chances that the uneducated dictator could tell a centrifuge from a cow-milking machine? By claiming that the program was disbursed at hundreds of different sites, it would ensure that Saddam was never able to visit more then a handful and therefore would not be able to uncover the fraud.
Think of this as the Heisenberg Defense, after German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who claimed after World War II that he tricked Hitler into thinking his team was working on an atomic bomb while in reality they were deliberately spinning their wheels. Unfortunately for the viability of this defense, most people didn’t believe Heisenberg.
If this keeps up, we’re going to have to run a contest: what’s the most bizarre excuse that war partisans can come up with for the missing WMD? My money is on Steven Den Beste to come up with the best one.
