perfidy

The Washington post reports today that Bush administration officials are now conceding that " it may take a long time, if ever, before they are able to prove the expansive case they made to justify the war." 

Glad they made it to the party. I'm not quite sure what to make of this admission by the Bush camp that their Weapons! Of! Mass! Destruction! are currently nothing but VaporWare. I see three possibilities.

• The WMD's exist, but in the run-up to the war, Iraq had time to sell, hide, or export them. If this is the case, both the US and its erstwhile opponents (France et. al) will blame the other side for allowing this to happen. The US will claim that the delays they conceded to while the Weapons Inspectors did their thing allowed Iraq the time to play their shell game, and the US' opponents will claim that if said Inspectors had been given just one more day we'd now know where the 120 tons of Anthrax have gone.
• There never were any WMD's. Whatever!
• Hussein is wilier than we thought, and as we ruminate, the chemical weapons are now in various undisclosed locations on the Syrian border, in bunkers deep underground, defended by the Elite Republican Guard, and a big robot Saddam Clone at the end. Jeez, where's Sgt. BJ Blazcowicz* when you need him? 

In my unprofessional and uninformed opinion, I'd lay 3:2 odds the first is true, 100:1 on the second, and 5:1 on the third, except the Robot Saddam part. 

EVERYBODY knows Hussein had ridiculous amounts of biological and nerve agents after the end of Gulf War I: First Blood. He proved that when he gassed the Kurds. But, in the eleven years since, isn't it possible that every two-bit terrorist who could put together a suitcase of nonconsecutive bills came away from a visit with Saddam with a couple armloads of Sarin and a bag o' Anthrax? Granted, we haven't seen these weapons used by any Islamic terrorists, but there's a LOT of caves we haven't looked in yet, and the War! On! Terror! will never be over. 

*I can see the ad now: "He vanquished the Nazis, he destroyed the Zombies, now Sergeant BJ Blazcowicz faces his most dangerous assignment ever. WOLFENSTEIN III: IRAQ & ROLL!" Now THAT would be a game I would play. 

[moreover] Calpundit links to a loooong list of quotes from the Bush administration about WMD's, saying, "So please don't insult our intelligence by pretending that WMD wasn't the main selling point of the war. We all know it was." Yup.