Rush to war (crimes)

I’ve been pondering the Case of the Missing WMDs for some weeks now, along with, it seems, everyone else.

Well, no, it seems that many folks haven’t been pondering the matter, but instead have automatically assumed that it was all a Big Lie by Evil Bush, a bill of goods, a transparent attempt to secure Iraq’s oil, or distract from the economy’s problems, or something (as if that was the easiest way to do that, or as if that was the only reason put forward for the war on Iraq).

Here’s a good summary of why that’s a less-than-convincing assumption. A summary of my own:

1. Iraq had WMDs. They admitted it. A bunch of them were found and destroyed by the UN inspectors in the 90s — who eventually had to leave, their job incomplete, because Iraq wasn’t cooperating any more. Why was that?
2. The UN inspectors, even this year, noted that there was a lot of unaccounted-for material. Iraq continued to hedge and hem and haw and fail to cooperate. The UN resolutions basically required that Iraq prove they were clean. Iraq quite intentionally failed to do so.
3. There were plenty of foreign countries (France, Germany, Russia) who were against a war on Iraq — and who, in fact, had substantial financial, ideological, and social motivation to prevent such a war. All of them believed that Iraq had WMDs. None of them came out and said, “Hey, the CIA is being forced to spin their intelligence by warhawks in the Pentagon, so Bush is lying about Iraqi arms programs. Our intelligence says that Iraq is devoid of WMDs, and we’ll match that evidence against anything the Americans and Brits want to claim.” No, all they did was argue about how to disarm Iraq, not whether Iraq needed disarming. And they were quite willing to use the prospect of Iraq using WMDs as an argument against military action. And I’m still not hearing any “I told you so” statements from France or Germany or Russia. (It’s also been noted that these were among the folks who said that UN Inspections should be given several months to years in order to declare Iraq “clean” — though it’s also true that there’s a difference between finding everything and finding anything.)
4. The idea that Saddam declined to cooperate with UN inspections, even with the imminent prospect of war, in order to save face with his own people and the world community, seems simplistic. This is a man who managed to “save face” over being thrown out of Kuwait, and Iran. This is a man whose security apparatus and grip over his country was so tight that he could denude forests, dry up swamps, and bury children alive, and still maintain power. That he couldn’t come up with a way — were he innocent of WMD plans, production, or stockpiling — to satisfy the UN (and his prospective clients in France, etc.) and still keep a grip on power and maintain his standing in the Arab world is ludicrous.

So, where are the WMDs?

1. Buried. Hidden. A decade of time, absolute control, and a country the size of California make this not unlikely, especially when we’re not talking about hiding aircraft carriers or something like that — we’re talking about manufacturing facilities which could be in large trucks, and material that could be stored in drums marked “solvent” and “pesticide” and “undistributed UN food supplies.”
2. Smuggled out. See above. Given how porous the sanctions regime was to stuff getting in (or, as was the case of Syria, with stuff getting out), it’s quite likely some weapons could be removed from the scene.
3. Destroyed. But recently, as the JDAMs were beginning to fall. Pour a few thousand gallons of Bad Stuff into a sandy trench, bulldoze it over, and, voila, all’s well and hands are clean (until it hits the water table, but that might takes weeks, months, or years).
4. Not yet found. There’s this mistaken idea floating out there that some magic list of a dozen Big, Obvious Warehouses was put forward as where all the Bad Stuff was, and it’s been just a matter of sending a couple of Marines in a jeep to go poke around and find the Big Drums marked Illegal Bio-Weapons and Nerve Gas. There are hundreds of most-likely sites, acres and acres of stuff to inspect there, and the US military is already being beaten up over not spending enough time protecting important things, like museums, and not getting the power running, and not digging up mass graves fast enough.
5. It was all an Iraqi conspiracy. This is actually a fun one — the idea that there were plenty of functionaries of Saddam who were playing a game, skimming off R&D budgets, and sending reports back to Baghdad about their weapons programs. A highly dangerous game, to be sure, but potentially a profitable one — and one that would both keep Saddam happy, keep him from wanting to cooperate with the UN, keep foreign intelligence buzzing, and keep the folks involved from being accused of actual war crimes. And it’s not likely that any Iraqi “in the know” who’s come forward to the US and UK with this info would be believed — yet (or, if confirmed, that their story would be likely to be released any time soon).
6. We’ve found the stuff — we’ve just not told anyone yet. Are the US and UK governments holding onto evidence to blackmail certain other countries? Or evidence that their own corporations (or even governments) were involved in these programs (in the past, or recently)? This would also explain why none of the in-the-know folks who have been captured haven’t had their stories made public yet. Hey, if you want a conspiracy theory, this one’s got even more to offer than “It’s all about ooooiiiiillllll.”

I don’t know — and nobody else pontificating on the subject knows, either. We know there there was Bad Stuff there, a decade ago. We just don’t know, yet, what happened to all of it. Deciding, especially at this juncture, it was all a Big Lie seems premature at best, and nonsensical at worst.