Twistin' and Turnin'
The Iraq Survey Group just came out with a 92 page report. The focus was on Weapons of Mass Destruction. For those of you with no long term memories, those WMDs were the primary scare tactic that Bush and company used to justify the need to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. The U.N. Weapons Inspectors said that Iraq didn't have them. Saddam Hussein said he didn't have them (but he has been known to lie before - and he has said before that he did have some). But Bush said they did and attacked anyways. Then we got in there and months and months went by and there never did turn up any WMDs. So then they started floating stories that Iraq had smuggled them out to Syria before we invaded. I've always had a few problems with this one:1) It never was mentioned as possibility until after it became embarassingly obvious that there weren't any WMD's in Iraq and therefore sounded a lot like a five year old's excuse making ('But mom, maybe the dog already broke your glass vase and put it back together so when I bumped into it, it would fall apart?').
2) If we were so concerned about Iraq's WMDs, why wouldn't we have had such constant survelliance on them so we could have seen the world's largest parade of trucks required to move out that much stuff to Syria?
3) If we were so concerned about WMDs, why have we STILL done little to nothing about going into Syria to pursue these?
Frankly, I never really expected to have to hear much more garbage about this, since it was only about one step above the excuse that Saddam ate the evidence before we could catch him with it. So when I saw that there was another report yesterday confirming the lack of any evidence of Iraq having WMDs again, I didn't think it was odd that the network news didn't waste any of the thirty seconds that story earned with talk about Syria.
But here in Seattle the only local political radio is conservative KVI. And driving into work this morning Kirby Wilbur took advantage of his time to lead with attacking the "liberal media bias" (I still can't help but laugh when conservatives WORKING IN THE MEDIA try that line) for not including how the report did not rule out the possibility that the WMDs could have been transferred to Syria. Now I know the last thing a conservative is going to do is admit that they've been lying all the time, but I really figured this was one where they would just ignore it, rather than open themselves up with that junk.
But since I hadn't heard more than the snipet from the news, I decided I should look it up. Turns out that the report actually says that such a transfer was "unlikely". So no, it didn't rule it out, but it didn't rule out that space aliens could have come down and stole the WMDs either.
Why is it so much more important to make your side look right instead of being really honest?
posted by gurufrisbee @ 9:53 AM
