Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper

This story should be all over the news, but instead we're being treated to a running commentary on who won the fucking lottery.

[I]nvestigators have found no support for the two main
fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had
a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new
ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators
said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as
anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining
pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly
classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq
did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its
most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in
storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program,
described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a
"mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered
state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s. A review of available
evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some
they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms
establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged
before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry,
supported by observations on the ground, described factories and
institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict,
arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's
biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal
strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up
and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the
investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not
possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like
the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In other words, the UN sanctions prevented Iraq from
building a WMD program (see also: Libya). But before you go flying off
the handle about Bush lying to start a war for oil, take a look at
these terrifying plans for world domination:

These are some of Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi's secret
sketches for two illegal long-range missiles, one using two engines and
one using five boosters.

Ooooooooooh, scary. If these are the criteria for being a member of the
Axis of Evil, then every 8 year old with a pencil had better get to
work on their spider holes.

Posted by flow Frazao on January 7, 2004 at 03:03 PM | Permalink