Spin doctors

I was pointed in the direction of this article this evening with the headline trumpeting "UN inspectors: Saddam shipped out WMD before war and after." I was able to immediately discount the article based on my status as a card-carrying bleeding heart liberal but it was a misspelling (Destionations) that really did me in -- politics aside, I cannot take a journalistic organization seriously if they cannot even spell the word 'destinations' -- because obviously, if it hadn't rated on google news, how could it possibly be true?

After much searching, I did find some more articles on the issue here. What fascinated me was the spin. In the World Tribune article, it says Saddam was shipping out the WMD components before the war began last summer and continued to do during the war. However, the World Tribune article also says Perricos also reported that inspectors found Iraqi WMD and missile components shipped abroad that still contained UN inspection tags.. In other words, the stuff we already knew about. As my boss would say, that's not news if we already knew about it. Reading other articles on the subject which show up on google news seem to make it clear that this exporting of WMD components has been actively taking place over the last year -- under US watch -- from unguarded and unsecured locations in Iraq.

A story from Pakistan says Perricos briefed the Security Council on his recent report that showed satellite pictures of the engines discovered in the Netherlands and a site in Iraq stripped of its equipment, possibly by looters. To me, it sounds as if the World Tribune is trying to make a tenuous tie between Saddam and looters, ignoring the fact Saddam was probably way too busy crawling from spider hole to spider hole to export metal out of Iraq. The Indianapolis Star reports Equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been removed from Iraqi sites since the war started and shipped abroad, the head of the U.N. inspectors office told the Security Council on Wednesday.

Since the war started. Key words to note. Who knows what Saddam was doing with his WMD program before while under the watch of the UN, but since the US has kicked the UN inspectors out in March of 2003, who's keeping an eye on the WMD potpurri? Aren't we ostensibly over there to make the world a safer place to be and meanwhile, WMD components marked with UN tags are being hustled across the border and sent to the Netherlands (among other places) under the eyes of the liberators themselves?

I'll concede Iraq and Saddam had the components to make WMDS at some point in time, but is that enough to pre-emptively declare war on another sovereign nation? Especially if the World Tribune is right and they were being dismantled and shipped around the world in the early part of 2003 -- if the WMDs were dismantled, then Saddam did what he was supposed to do and we had no right to go in there and kick him out of power, no matter how big a beastie he was. You can't go into another country pre-emptively saying, "Oh, he's got WMDs" and come out saying, "We're liberators and we've saved people from Saddam." Great. Now if it's saving the world from the classroom bully we're so keen on these days, I humbly submit that perhaps the Sudanese would appreciate some liberation as well.

We'd be hard-pressed to find a direct threat to our security from Saddam's regime, considering that Saddam probably had higher priority targets on his hit list than the Americans. In truth, the only people who really needed to fear Saddam's WMDs were the ones who lived under his tyrannical rule -- the Kurds -- and also his neighbors, the Iranians and the Kuwaitis. We ought to be more afraid of the Saudi Arabians, where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from. We ought to be more afraid of North Korea, which is ruled by a crazy dictator who admittedly has nuclear weapons and WMDs, but we can't win a conflict with North Korea, nor does North Korea have oil. If you're going to pick a fight with a bully, it makes sense to pick one you can beat up easily and figure out the reasons for throwing the first punch after the fact and hope no one notices.