"Weapons of Mass Destruction" and "Hussein's Al Qaeda "Pals"

Two news stories today deserve to be both mentioned and connected in our PA
Blog, even though the New York Times, which printed them wouldn't do that.
The first is the latest horror from Iraq. A suicide bomber in Ramadi detonated
a truck with explosives and chlorine poison gas, killing 20 people(the official
numbers) in a residential area after he failed to detonate the explosives and
poison gas at a checkpoint. The story goes on to say that this is the sixth
such recent attack with poison gas in Anbar province, a Sunni majority province
that that story, before it drops the point and goes on to catalogue the rest of
the day's death and destruction in Iraq, refers to as "haven for al-Quaeda."

Poison gas was a component of the Trinity of Weapons of Mass Destruction"(the
other two were nuclear and biological that the Bush administration claimed that
he, world threatening villain that he was, was building. Hussein had
previously used poison gas against Iranians, the Kurdish minority in his own
country and others with at least the indirect support and protection of the
Reagan and Bush I administrations, but not in the first Gulf War, where he was
fighting against people he knew could easily destroy him. Post Gulf War UN inspections had gone on for many years(backed up by sanctions) to insure that such weapons were not being produced by his regime.

But those were obstacles to the Bush administration's war plans--obstacles that Big Lie propaganda quickly removed. Although it spent significant amounts of money to find evidence of facilities to manufacture poison gas, along with any nuclear or bacteriological weapons material, the administration was embarrassed and disappointed by its complete failure to do so.

Now poison gas(chemical "weapons of mass destruction") are being used in Iraq, but the administration isn't boasting that these deaths prove that they were
right all the time. Even for them, that would be a bit much.

The second story deals with a declassified report of the Inspector General understating what all serious observers have known for years, that the a group of "defense department officials" "undercut the intelligence community" to provide "inappropriate" information about the alleged "Hussein-Al Qaeda link."

What this means of course is that they fabricated such a link and then used
their influence to prevent those in the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency
with different assessements and evidence to support such assessements from
being listened to and taken seriously.

Together, the two stories show that the administration launched a war to eliminate conditions that it knew(or at least those within it who could separate the stories that they knew were being fabricated from reality) that didn't exist, and that now do to exist thanks to their actions(the use of chemical weapons and Al Qaeda's involvement in terrorist attacks in Iraq, especially in using suicide attacks and fomenting religious sectarian violence, not
necessarilyy in alliance with other groups).

The Al Qaeda story then goes on to say that the report was declassified and released on a day that Cheney is speaking on Rush Limbaugh's radio political comedy show to say that to advocate withdrawal from Iraq at this point seems to me to play into the hands of Al Qaeda." Somehow Yogi said it much better when he said "dejavu all over again" and again and again and again.

--Norman Markowitz