The Case for WMD

William Rivers Pitt just published an article on Truthout titled Yes, They Lied. It's a critique of the argument made by the right that Bush was justified in invading Iraq because even Clinton thought the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction.

Find a defender of the White House on your television these days, and you are likely to hear them blame Bill Clinton for Iraq. Yes, you read that right. The talking point du jour lately has focused on comments made by Clinton from the mid-to-late 1990s to the effect that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat. The pretzel logic here, of course, is straightforward: this Democratic president thought the stuff was there, and that justifies the claims made by the Bush crew over the last few years about Iraqi weapons.

Let's take a deeper look at the facts. Right off the bat, it is safe to say that Clinton and his crew had every reason to believe Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction during the 1990s. For one thing, they knew this because the previous two administrations - Reagan and Bush - actively assisted the Hussein regime in the development of these programs. In other words, we had the receipts.

He then goes on to evaluate not the VERITY of these claims, but the APPLICABILITY of them:

"After 1998," Ritter reports in a book I wrote in 2002 titled War on Iraq, "Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed. What this means is that 90%-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability, including all of their factories used to produce chemical, biological, nuclear long-range ballistic missiles, the associated equipment of these factories, and the vast majority of the product produced by these factories, had been verifiably eliminated."

But the stockpiles that Saddam had? The stuff we were afraid of to which we "had the receipts"?

"Now, there are those who say that the Iraqis could have hid some of this from us," continued Ritter. "The problem with that scenario is that whatever they diverted would have had to have been produced in the Muthanna State establishment, which means that once we blew up the Muthanna State establishment, they no longer had the ability to produce new agent, and in five years science takes over. Sarin and tabun will degrade and become useless sludge. It's no longer a viable chemical agent that the world needs to be concerned about."

"So," concluded Ritter, "all this talk about Iraq having chemical weapons - most of it is based upon speculation that Iraq could have hid some of this from UN weapons inspectors. That speculation is no longer valid, not in terms of the Iraqi ability to hide this stuff from inspectors - although I believe we did such a good job of inspecting Iraq that if they had tried to hide it, we would have found it. But let's just say that they did try to hide it, and we never found it. So what? It's gone today, so let's throw out that hypothetical. It's not even worth the time to talk about it anymore."

And who is this "Ritter" guy that Pitt quotes? Only the UNSCOM chief weapons inspector in charge of sniffing out Iraq's WMD. But what would he know?

Please, read it. If you're on the right or the left, or somewhere in the middle, read it. Even if you don't agree with it, read it. The arguments are made there, divorced from the rhetoric of politics, and it's based on logical reason that flows from evidence rather than ad hominem attacks.

We need to elevate the dialogue and make claims based on evidence rather than emotions. We need to start investigating the current political climate rationally rather than ideologically, or ideologues will continue to be able to play us off of one another and destroy our ability to have a rational argument.