perfidy

Weapons programs, not stockpiles - that is the important thing. The military and intelligence agencies must always look at capabilities and intentions. The fact that someone is working on - for an actual known fact, known to be working on WMD, and has made it obvious that he is not our friend, that is plenty serious. Personally, I don't want to wait until minutes before he has working weapons systems, I want the threat removed.

And the consensus view of everyone from Clinton to the French to the UN before the conflict was that he had WMD, and was working on more. You can't fault the administration for sharing that opinion. The opponents of the war before it started wanted inspections to continue, so that we could contain the WMD threat. Only after did the hue and cry about "no WMD, no justice" arise.

The antiwar left was anti war, period. It didn't matter what instrumentality they used to try to achieve the goal of thwarting the US actions in Iraq. The fact that we have not found WMD worries me, because UN inspectors knew he had that 10,000 gallons back in the late nineties, and I'd like to know where it went - Syria? Iran? Terrorists? It is a national security question, to be sure.

But the fact that we did not find them in no way invalidates or delegitimizes the libervation. We freed 25 million people from tyranny. We removed a clear threat to American citizens. We prevented thousands of deaths that would certainly have happened had Saddam's death machine been allowed to roll on unimpeded. And we permanently removed the possiblilty that Iraq would develop WMD.

It has been US policy since the cold war that chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction, period. It doesn't matter that Mustard Gas is not terribly lethal. But five more seconds of internet research will show you the horrible effects - burns, blindness, damaged lungs are certainly worse than your average suicide bomb or RPG hit.

I wrote the above before reading Dean's post. I don't see where he says the mustard gas satisfies him. What he is right to say, is that the wmd were one of about a dozen reasons that the administration gave for going to war. Ack.

Dean is apparantly a Democrat, or was in the not to distant past. This is the first time I've read his blog. Good stuff, thanks for the link, Ross.

Should I bother to pipe up again with my contention that I was not against getting rid of Hussein per se (who could be?) but always felt that the DoD and President were making hash of the postwar planning from the start? Hearts and minds? Brief, effective reconstruction?

And where the hell ARE all those gallons of Anthrax that the US sold him back in the day?

"Do five seconds of research on the internet on Mustard Gas, and you discover that it isn't a weapon of mass destruction"

I think that these days it depends who you ask.

Historically, the US position was that chemical weapons of any stripe (blister [ie mustard], blood, nerve) were "weapons of mass destruction", and their use could be met with a WMD (ie nuclear) response. This position was meant to thwart the massive stockpile of Soviet/Pact battlefield chem/bio weapons with US tactical nuclear weapons.

Today, I don't think anyone outside of Beltway eggheads really uses the term "WMD" in a consistent way. THe general populace had no idea what those 3 little letters meant together before a year ago, and lacking a coherent definition, it is left to believe they mean whatever it wishes.