Shades of gray

ABC is running a Sunday morning feature asking the question, "do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"?" Not hard to figure out where this one's going.

There were no surprises. This is one of the most cleverly worded MSM Iraq war hit pieces yet, suggesting a level of psychological instability not only for Bush and his administration, but for republicans, bloggers, Fox News, or anyone else who could possibly believe Saddam Hussein was capable of obfuscation:

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

Let me translate, "What idiots. I was right all along." It goes on to suggest the reason nearly half of America still believes Saddam had a stash can be blamed on Santorum's recent 500 chemical shell announcement:

"These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. "They weren't deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis."

It's no mystery they quoted Ritter, since he's the most vocal anti-Bush critic among the former inspector crowd. It's as if they believe he was THE inspector.

Short of WMDs, the article moves towards preposterously questioning whether Iraq under Saddam was any threat at all, as if the whole thing was fashioned out of Bush cloth:

The facts are that Iraq after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.

This is exactly where the breakdown of clear thinking begins. We know the 500 shells weren't the same WMD's Clinton, Kerry, and most world intelligence agencies had warned us about. As Mr. Peck said in Ghostbusters, 'we're not grotesquely stupid'. We also know they weren't the programs Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel spoke about in 1995 or that the captured DOCEX documents have recently alluded to. We know.

What this reporter and others cannot grasp is the shells go toward a totality of the picture. That's what Deroy Murdock's site shows. Few peaceful countries have thousands of binary shells just lying around or buried, any single one of which would place them in material breach of UN resolutions slapped on them due to past aggressive actions, while at the same time harboring terrorists. Any reasonable person would have to ask the question, what else was buried in Iraq?

But reasonableness has never been a feature of these kinds of debates. Liberals often argue passionately that the world is not black and white, but shades of gray. Yet in this instance it IS black and white, case closed, Bush lied. Perhaps someone should do a story regarding the psychological effects of blind political hatred overtaking common sense judgment.

As an addendum to this story, we are now finding out that Iran clandestinely tried to acquire uranium yellowcake from Africa, of all places. Yet MSM conventional wisdom has hammered hard the fact that Bush lied about Africa. And this, my friends, is why 50 percent of Americans are smart enough not to blindly trust Saddam.

MORE 8/6/06

Remember the foiled chemical attack on Jordan?

Jordanian authorities said the attack would have mixed a combination of 71 lethal chemicals, which they said has never been done before, including blistering agents to cause third-degree burns, nerve gas and choking agents.

Don't worry if you missed it--there was scant coverage in the US media, which continues now as the trial progresses.

There is some dispute whether any of the chemicals seized came from Saddam's known stash (remember, the UN destroyed some VX as late as 1999 that he wasn't supposed to have had). Here's a State Department document outlining Iraq's presumed WMD cache, gleaned from UNSCOM/UN records.

We still don't have independent verification of the destruction of that VX, yet we do know that Zarqawi had some chemical expertise and had been working on such with Ansar al-Islam outside the Saddam-controlled area before the invasion, so it's possible there was an independent source.

But again, we know Zarqawi was in cahoots with the Sunni/Saddamist insurgency in Iraq, therefore if VX did remain they would be a likely source. Without verification it's hard to be sure, but such was the nature of Saddam's regime.

But ok, it was just those 500 shells.