Wednesday, October 08, 2003

Judging from this AP report, it appears that the Bush administration's new Iraq strategy consists largely of having Dick Cheney's Big Lies delivered in a high, girlish voice:

Rice Says Iraq Never Disarmed

...Condoleezza Rice told a foreign policy forum in Chicago that the team led by chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay "is finding proof that Iraq never disarmed and never complied with U.N. inspectors."

In fact, she suggested, if the U.N. Security Council knew last winter what Kay's group has uncovered now, it never would have rejected the U.S. call for war.

"Right up until the end, Saddam lied to the Security Council. And let there be no mistake, right up to the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction and to hide his illegal weapons activity," she told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

..."We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks," Rice said. Still, she added, the possibility that the Iraqi leader could be behind another attack "beyond the scale of 9-11 ... could not be put aside." ...


Oh, for the love of Mike.... Iraq clearly had WMDs a long time ago. They're not there now, dammit. A hundred thousand Americans were in Saddam's own country overthrowing his government and he couldn't get his chem-bio-nuke act together to attack a single one of those soldiers unconventionally. The UN couldn't find the WMDs and the best we've come up with is one stinking vial of botulinum toxin squirreled away far from any battalion of soldiers or military outpost.

Do these Bushies ever get sick of lying?

(UPDATE: And don't forget that that vial of botulinum toxin had been sitting in a refrigerator since 1993, as Billmon notes, and is a precursor agent, not a bioweapon on its own.)

(UPDATE: Actually, it's awfully hard to beat the debunking of the Kay report by Fred Kaplan in Slate, which points out weasel-word after weasel-word and shows that no one's yet found evidence of an imminent threat.)

(UPDATE: I said "botulinum toxin" above, but of course it wasn't toxin at all, as a reader has pointed out. And see this later post for more, from the L.A. Times.)

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