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[Previous entry: "Another less-than-joyous anniversary"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Standards"] 08 May 2003: "Absence of evidence? Well, no"
There's a column in the WaPo by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor of The New Republic, titled "Blinded by Bush-Hatred" (link via both Jackie D and COINTELPRO Tool). The piece articulates a feeling I've had for a while, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this, which is that a great deal of opposition to the war in Iraq was—and continues to be—based first and foremost on dislike of the Bush administration.
Opponents of the war are starting to assert, or at least hint, that the entire rationale for the conflict has been undermined. The notion that Bush made the whole thing up about weapons of mass destruction has taken root on the left and is creeping ever closer to the liberal mainstream.Chait goes on to point out that, while there is no shortage of reasons to distrust the Bush administration's word on any number of issues, the case against the former Iraqi régime does not rely on the administration's word alone. Chait cites the findings of UNSCOM in the 1990s, but we don't even need to that far back; in earlier entries (here and here), I cited the report by Hans Blix to the Security Council of 14-Feb-2003 and the UNMOVIC 12th quarterly report of 28-Feb-2003, both of which established a clear picture that Iraq had not met its obligations to disarm. Note that those reports are less than three months old. As recently as the end of February, the question the world was grappling with was not whether Iraq had NBC weapons stockpiles and/or development programmes, but whether it could be made to give them up—as it had agreed to do in 1991—without a full-scale war. The claim that "inspections were working" was based on the fact that UNMOVIC inspectors were finding materials which, had Iraq been meeting its commitments, they should not have been. Thus, to assert at this point that Iraq did not have any NBC weapons stockpiles and/or development programmes is disingenuous at best, and evidence of wilful ignorance (combined with the apparent attention span of a goldfish) or even outright mendacity at worst. |
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