I heard my first big-media Kay-Report recap yesterday, on WCBS 880AM New York, while driving home from the train station. I nearly couldn’t believe my ears that CBS News was leading not with the “no actual WMDs” angle but with the “lots and lots of WMD programs and intent to develop actual WMDs as soon as possible” angle. Holy crap, I thought, but the news media is actually going to report the non-BUSHLIED! parts of this story!
Then came the cold, harsh light of this morning, and you get this sort of thing. It beats the living shit out of the fact that they didn’t turn up a Batcave full of loaded anthrax bombs, then peppers that pesky part about how Saddam had every intention of getting back to the WMD business the second the French & Russians got those sanctions lifted with enough “some”s and “signs that”s and attempts to cast the whole thing in a “hey, this isn’t the final report, folks, we can still pull something out of our sleeves” they’re-still-lying negativism to choke a horse. And we’re not even talking about their usual stealth-mode front-page anti-Bush editorial “news analysis.”
Do yourself a favor: Read the actual report. Or read Andrew Sullivan’s analysis thereof.
If you’re interested, here’s my breakdown of this whole situation:
1) Saddam Hussein had every intention of continuing to develop WMDs, and had devoted countless man-hours and billions of dollars into creating a program specifically, and explicitly, designed for optimum concealability. He lied about these programs to the UN despite the fact that the post-Gulf War I ceasefire was conditional upon his honesty and compliance. These programs are documented in-depth in this report.
2) The same countries and parties that opposed the war in favor of sanctions tended almost to a man to have once been in favor of removing the sanctions altogether on understandable humanitarian grounds. If the sanctions had been lifted, the WMD program would have restarted in earnest and produced WMD materials within months.
3) Once war became an option due to the insistence of the Blair and Bush administrations, one-time opponents of sanctions then became sanction advocates, essentially promoting an ineffectual regime of economic punishments that enriched Saddam and his Baathist affiliates while keeping the citizens of Iraq in poverty and under the rule of a murderous tyrant and his would-be successor sons.
4) Saddam Hussein was an aggressive mass murderer with a proven track record of starting wars with his neighbors despite guaranteed massive reprisals and almost no demonstrable benefit to his regime or his country, had used WMDs in one of those wars, and had torched oil wells and opened pipelines into the sea in the other despite the “deterrent” threat of nuclear retalliation by the U.S. were he to do so. He was in essence “undeterrable.”
5) By ALL accounts Saddam Hussein was believed to have WMDs and WMD programs, to have lied to and thwarted inspectors, and to have violated the conditions of the ceasefire (though this was often couched in the far less consequential vocabulary of “violating UN resolutions”). Democracts, Republicans, the US, the UK, France, and on and on and on agreed on these points.
6) The Bush Administration never claimed the threat from Iraq was “imminent,” and never based their case for war on such a claim. They argued that the threat should be eliminated BEFORE it became imminent.
My own personal “argument for war” was never terribly contingent on WMDs, because I can’t stand fascism and enjoy seeing fascists be deposed and destroyed just on principle. But to me, this report seals the WMD-argument deal as well. The negative spin placed on the report seems to stem from journalists and commentators who are doctrinairily opposed either to the war or, perhaps more to the point, to the Bush Administration itself.