The Independent and Reuters both wrote articles about a recent David Kay interview. Guest poster Trickster over at Tacitus mostly contents himself with quoting the relevant sections of the Independent article (the discussion thread isn’t too bad, all things considered): the Marxists over at Socialism in a Time of Waiting are considerably more willing to be expansive in their independent rebuttal of the Guardian Reuters piece, and they’re a lot ruder about the antiwar movement than I tend to be. Well, tend to express, at least; I try to keep a close eye on my temper and spleen production, you see.
UPDATE: Edited for general shoddiness. If I have It (whatever It is that bloggers are supposed to have when they’ve got It), this was not one of those days where It was obvious.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Fixed the link this time. Remember, kids, friends don’t let friends blog late at night.
Did you confuse the Independent with the Guardian, or is there a Guardian piece neither you nor the Marxists linked to?
Dammit, how the heck did I turn Reuters into Guardian? I am not on my blogging game tonight.
They really ought to allow comments if they’re going to be that obnoxious.
Here’s why I, antiwar person extraordinaire, do care about WMD:
1. Just about my deepest, darkest fear in the world is a nuclear attack on New York City.
2. This administration said, or at least strongly & deliberately implied, that we needed to invade Iraq so that couldn’t happen. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” Condi Rice said. Saddam has reconstituted nuclear weapons, Cheney says–an apparent misstatement that he never bothers to clearly correct, despite polls showing that most Americans believe Saddam to have nuclear weapons. President Bush said that Saddam could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year if he got enough enriched uranium–which is true, but since it’s true of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and other suicidal terrorist groups, it’s irrelevant and misleading. The 16 words. etc.
3. They also hyped the chem and bio threat–they thought he had some, but knew it wasn’t as clear cut as they were implying. They knew the guy was guilty so they screwed with the evidence.
4. While all this was going on, we put North Korea on the back burner and allowed them to re-start/accelerate their nuclear program.
5. The amount we spend on securing poorly guarded fissile material and nuclear weapons around the world is less than 1% of the cost of this war, and is not sufficient to deal with the threat. Needless to say, the highly enriched uranium sitting around under inadequate security in various countries is much more likely to be acquired by Al Qaeda than the nuclear materials and weapons that Saddam lusted after in his heart.
6. We have shot our credibility on weapons proliferation all to hell, at the time in our history when we needed it most.
7. Throughout all this we have neglected much greater threats than Iraq was, above all North Korea.
8. Our army is over-extended; if we threaten force we may not be believed.
9. As a result of the Iraq war, Islamist sentiment has increased, and opinions of the U.S. fallen drastically, throughout the Muslim world. This has happened even in formerly moderate countries like Indonesia and Nigeria. The president of Pakistan, a nuclear power, is facing increasingly skillful assassination attempts from Islamic extremists.
10. The President dishonestly exploited my darkest fear to pursue a policy I am pretty sure made that fear more likely to come true.
Does that qualify as caring about WMD?
hmm. 4 and 7 appear to be the same. To make up for it here’s a bonus:
they have not made any attempt to investigate why our intelligence was so badly wrong, or to modify the doctrine of preventive/preemptive war in light of the fact that the threat we were supposedly pre-empting did not exist.
Four points, if I may:
(1) We specified “anti-war clowns” as the target of our spleen, not every single person who opposed the war. On our blog “anti-war clowns” means the chief decision-makers and opinion-formers of the movement – the Stalinists, the pacifists, the kneejerk anti-Bush/Blair-ists and the like – not thoughtful opponents and critics who have some good points to make. We’re sorry if that seems “obnoxious”, but on the other hand, if you go around looking for things to be offended by …
(2) We still think that even the thoughtful end of the anti-war spectrum should calm down just a little. I won’t go over the points above in detail, as I don’t want to hog space, but, in summary:
(a) the case that the Ba’ath regime posed, at the very least, a serious threat of being able to re-start a WMD programme still stands, and still functions as one among several reasons for the war;
(b) the claim that Islamist sentiment is on the rise is just that – a claim, no more – and anyway is counterbalanced by the fact that liberal democracy is on the rise in Iraq (and in Nigeria too, by the way);
(c) the “demonstration effect” of Saddam’s overthrow has already helped to reduce the overall WMD threat by scaring the Iranian and Libyan regimes into compliance with the UN. As for North Korea, its dynastic ruler is so way beyond being influenced by US policy, or by reality in general, that his back-and-forth statements on WMD come as no surprise; at the same time,it’s entirely possible that, as in Iraq before the war, some of the leader’s aides and advisers are thinking more realistically than he is capable of doing, so there may be more, and more pleasant, surprises to come.
(3) Who is this “we” anyway? When we use the word we mean just the three of us on our blog, as we don’t claim to speak on behalf of anyone else. In fact it’s good practice for writers in general to keep an eye on their pronouns: are you one person, a group of friends and neighbours, or millions and millions? And why identify yourself so glibly with an administration that you then, confusingly, dissociate yourself from?
(4) The top and tail of our post on WMD, with its references to Hans Andersen, should have alerted you to our intention, not to be obnoxious or splenetic for the sake of it, but to have some fun at the expense of people who richly deserve to be laughed at – but, once again, we don’t mean those who are still capable of dialogue, just those who specialise in monologue.
And as this comment is tending in that direction, I’ll stop.
Yours for peace and justice (not peace at the expense of justice)!
On our blog “anti-war clowns” means the chief decision-makers and opinion-formers of the movement – the Stalinists, the pacifists, the kneejerk anti-Bush/Blair-ists and the like – not thoughtful opponents and critics who have some good points to make.
You mean that my decisions and opinions are determined by kneejerk pacifistic Stalinists? No wonder it’s so hard to get up in the morning…
Just one thing on the SiaToW article, since there are no comments there — they appear to have misread Kay’s comments about pre- versus post-GWI stockpiles. What he said was there appears not to have been any post-GWI stockpiling, and they have apparently interpreted him to mean that there had been. This is not really a major point, but it’s not a minor one, either. Furthermore, given the highly dubious testimony we have already gotten from “defectors” in the past, and the prominent role that dubious testimony has already played in the deeply flawed intelligence process that drove this boat in 2002, I for one am less than impressed with Mr. Kay’s reliance on that form of intelligence to indict Syria. Which is not at all the same as saying that Syria is blameless, or that no transfers of material occurred.
I, for one, have no trouble with “war of liberation” as a moniker, though I find it as laughably incomplete as the SiaToW crowd find the shorthand “war.” I prefer “war of liberation, now that our other reasons are not turning out the way we’d hoped they would,” but that is quite a mouthful, and at least “war” has the virtue of brevity.