Tuesday, March 16, 2004 :::
 
This is perplexing.

Apparently it is an article of faith among some conservatives that weapons of mass destruction will be found, soon.

The indispensable Wall Street Journal, as one of its writers once told me, loves letters, and they have a somewhat disturbing tendency to chose the most polarizing--the way sports call-in show hosts trash one team just to get a bunch of irate people calling in. It is nonetheless surpring that at least one letter writer this morning was capable of saying that we haven't found WMD because "we haven't looked everywhere." In another publication, a writer that this writer reveres--perhaps the finest political reporter in the country--wrote that the weapons "haven't been found (yet)."

Haven't looked everywhere? Haven't been found yet?

Let's take those in order.

Of course we haven't looked everywhere. Iraq is a big country. We also happen to be runningit, and it has proven one very hard place to run. Frankly, just about the silliest way to find any WMD is to start at the Turkish border and sweep the place with toothbrushes until we get to Iran and the Gulf. That kind of search can be more reasonably done by taking endless satellite photographs and checking out anything anomalous. Guess what? We've done that.

The only other thing to do is go over records and interview anyone who might have been involved. Check and check.

Oh, and check the ground for radiation and chemicals. Check again.

Now, what about that "yet?"

If we start with the money that we know Saddam had and subtract the money he spent on ornate "palaces" and stashes of porn, and then further subtract the money he spent on torturing people and decorating his phony army, what are we left with? Why, just about enough money to pay all those scientists who quite freely testify that they took the money rather than get shot or worse for failing to produce a successful weapons program.

There is a chance, one supposes--if, and only if, the ten cards missing from the Deck of 54, and any biological weapon scientists and soldiers we haven't captured, turn out to be exactly those people who ran the program. A statistician might be able to run the probabilities for us, but let's just say the chances of our being thatunlucky are pretty slim.

But should we stake our little electoral all on the slimmest of chances? Or should we build from what David Kay found, which flatly contradicts what the President said, but demolishes the anti-war argument?

There's that pesky name again.

Going hand-in-hand with a belief that "they've got to be there somewhere," apparently, is the belief that David Kay was an incompetent slacker, or, worse, that he had fallen under the sway of the New York Times. He is, in fact, a highly competent and experienced civil servant who believed with all his heart that WMD were there, did everything he could to find them, and concluded that they were not, in fact, there.

Which they probably aren't.

And of course it is his fault that he was sent in in July, and not April, and that several hundred of his workers had to be pulled off because of the failure of other people to have a contingency plan in place for an insurgency.

"Other people" are herein defined as 'Donald Rumsfeld," who is the same guy who waited until July to start looking for the weapons of mass destruction which were the primary reason we went into Iraq.

So maybe, you know, it just isn't David Kay's fault at all.

As most Americans have concluded. As long as conservatives keep saying this kind of thing, a majority of Americans are going to continue to think the President lied about WMD, which he didn't.

Which brings us to another, newer conservative article of faith, the one where we went in because...oh, never mind.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:49 PM


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