| |
|
OG:
What I'm interested in discussing is: were those weapons there and/or being developed? Does this news suggest that this is more of a grey-area case than it first seemed? Should we be willing to entertain that notion, or is there (as you suggest) no point in further investigation?
There was no evidence. What if the "hunches" or, worse yet (on the black humor scale), the lies turn out to be true in some part? Would it go towards justifying what's happened or not?
I was quite surprised that weapons weren't found, given that pretty much every government in the world with a military wants powerful weapons; no, this "news" doesn't suggest anything like that; there isn't really much point in further investigation IMO and in any case, nobody is actually investigating as such - we have the USG trying to find anything that looks like it will back its original position up either through evidence or insinuation, and they've always been quite clear that they don't want anyone else investigating...
...you know, though, I feel slightly dirty even talking about this issue again, for two reasons. Number one is that the whole issue was basically made up by the USG. WMDs were never a realistic excuse for going to war, legally or ethically - you can construct a situation in which they might have been, but in no possible way were they at the time. Even if they had had WMDs the USG response would still have been absurd.
Number two is that the lies have already been told. The USG said quite clearly "we know they have WMDs, we have evidence, we know where they are". Quite clearly they didn't, unless Mr Hussein is David Copperfield. Even if a whole lake of anthrax was found under Baghdad tomorrow that wouldn't change the fact that the USG did not know it was there. Of course, in practice this wouldn't count - people would say it justified the invasion and other people would believe them - but that's a propaganda issue; the simple fact is that they said things that weren't true and used them as reasons for invading Iraq.
The feeling I continually get is that even talking about WMDs in the context of justification is playing up to someone else's attempt to set the agenda. It was an unconvincing and, in the context of their actual actions (ignoring weapons inspectors and the UN etc), illogical excuse at the time; now it's just irrelevant. Thus even having this discussion is advancing the USG's cause. The question is not "are there WMDs?", it's "were their statements about knowing that there were WMDs, on which they justified their actions, true?" to which I consider the answer is a big fat no.
I wish that anti-war types would just not talk about current WMD finds at all, in fact. They're only giving credence to the administration's idea that if they were present it would justify the invasion. |
|
|
