Ace in the hole?
Over the past day, news has broken concerning the extinguished hunt for WMD’s in Iraq. Well, it’s news depending on whom you ask, and it concerns WMD’s depending on whom you ask also.
For the curious (and anyone not prone to taking Rick Santorum’s word for much of anything), click here for the declassified content of the report fueling tireless told-you-so’s from the partisan right. (To just view the substance of the declassified portion in JPG format, click here)
There’s little doubt that Mr. Santorum’s use of a term like “weapons of mass destruction” is quite calculated. What I’m wondering is if everyone else crowing over the alleged proof just neglected to read the report; or perhaps they’re simply unaware that they can actually read the report for themselves (really, it’s quite brief).
Which isn’t my way of saying definitively “there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” It’s just my way of objecting to facts not yet in evidence – which has actually been my attitude toward the WMD angle for a long time. It’s also why I haven’t accused the President of lying, as many other folks unhappy with the war have done – but make no mistake, I am profoundly unhappy with the war on several different levels.
Until I get my secret war hawk decoder ring in the mail and see the invisible ink from this report that says, “we found WMD’s” or something to that effect, please don’t bother me with grand pronouncements that the report proves the existence of WMD’s. It may be in the other portion of the report, you know, the part that’s still classified – in which case, it seems a bit irresponsible to be spreading that information in this way.
But the angle that makes more sense to me is that Rick Santorum isn’t feeding off of privileged portions of any report; he’s probably just hoping a few (million?) folks here and there will confuse the mention of chemical weapons with WMD’s. Lethal though those chemicals may be, they don’t necessarily qualify as WMD’s, a term for which the definition seems in a constant state of flux.
Again, I’m not saying the book is necessarily closed on this weapons search. But a reasonable person has to wonder why nobody outside of partisan politicians with obvious agendas (and re-election campaigns brewing) has been cited as a source for the recent blaring headlines about WMD’s in Iraq.
Even the Pentagon, fresh off of providing talking points to pro-war lawmakers, is being so careful (or simply honest?) as to say the weapons in this report “are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war” (source). Again, not a liberal pundit, but an actual official of the current Defense Department.
Some war supporters saw this as the chief reason for going into Iraq, and for many, the belief in that reasoning has never waned. I can imagine the sense of relief/pride/superiority one must feel to hear news like this after being shouted down by your political foes for the past couple years – to suddenly see that glimmer that seems to justify your tireless faith. But in this case, it may be appropriate to make sure that glimmer isn’t just a mirage.
If it is more than that, one has to wonder why the White House has yet to trumpet such good news; it isn’t as if the administration’s been particularly modest on items that have this much potential to buoy its sagging numbers. Or who knows? Maybe it’s the ace in the hole for when approval ratings dip below 30.
