Pipes and WMDs 

Pipes and WMDs

Wasn't Daniel Pipes once a distinguished academic, dedicated to the search for truth?

After all the debate about WMDs, and whether the Bushies were clueless or lying, the best Pipes can say is: Saddam deliberately deceived the world, almost to the end, and many people working for Saddam were deceived or misinformed, so Western intelligence had no reliable information.

"Coalition intelligence agencies, not surprisingly, missed the final and unexpected twist in a long-running drama. Neither those agencies nor Western politicians lied; Saddam was the evil impostor whose deceptions in the end confused and endangered everyone, including himself."

Please.

No doubt, the people Dick Cheney thought were solid gold for information were full of crap. Does that mean Cheney was an innocent, who couldn't possibly have done better? Or has this been one more job at which he has proved totally incompetent, like being CEO of Halliburton?

Pipes does not mention the difference between nukes and other so-called WMDs. As Yglesias reminds us, it was always questionable whether anything other than a nuke is a WMD in any meaningful sense. Weren't the old-fashioned bombs that destroyed German and Japanese cities "weapons of mass destruction"? From the beginning there has been a big element of Walt Disney baby talk to all of this. "Evil people must have evil weapons--new inventions that they force enslaved scientists to come up with on their island fortresses."

On nukes, in contrast to chemicals and biologicals, it seems most likely the Bushies were lying rather than clueless. (See here and here). The latest and best information was to the effect that Saddam had no nukes. The Bushies ignored this awkward fact, and indeed rushed to invade, and forced UN inspectors to leave, partly because they didn't want any more embarrassing disclosures of nothing, nothing, nothing.

See again here.