THE GREAT WMD HUNT….This has been blogged all over the place, but it deserves every bit of attention it’s getting. So here again, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is Time magazine’s description of the WMD hunt in Iraq:
Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, “Are you in charge of finding WMD?” Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn’t his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. “Who?” Bush asked.
The problem here isn’t that Bush doesn’t know who Stephen Cambone is, the problem is that he had no idea even in general terms who was responsible for finding WMD. Doesn’t this make it pretty obvious that the WMD hunt is a bit less than a high priority for him?
After all the crap that Howard Dean got for not knowing to the nearest percent how many American troops were stationed overseas, you’d think a few more people would have picked up on this. But that would only happen if we had, you know, a liberal media….
