What We'll Know that We Don't Seem to Know Now

Many years from now the History Channel will air a show about the cause of the Iraq War and WMD. Most people will be shocked and say to ourselves, "I thought it was just the opposite! Everyone said so."

Well not quite, but here's a sneak peek:

The CIA's "Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD" by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), also known as the "Duelfer Report", was the authority commonly cited to debunk the threat of WMD as an excuse to invade Iraq in 2003.

Yet the following statements can be found in the Duelfer Report:

• "we cannot express a firm view on the possibility that WMD elements were relocated out of Iraq prior to the war"
• "ISG technical experts fully evaluated less than one quarter of one percent of the over 10,000 weapons caches throughout Iraq"
• "Iraq could have re-established an elementary BW [biological warfare] program within a few weeks to a few months of a decision to do so"

The potential for a hostile regime to build WMD was one of the primary reasons to invade, but not the only reason. Additionally, coalition forces have located and destroyed over 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003. Most of these were 10-15 years old and in varying states of deterioration. Putting aside what may have been smuggled out of the country, my guess is that we haven't come close to locating what is hidden and forgotten in Iraq and won't for decades to come. Consider this clipping from an article in a Japanese newspaper just yesterday:

"Abandoned chemical weapons in China: Japan should provide China with a full and complete update about specific steps that are being taken to ameliorate this continuing problem. This is both a health as well as an environmental concern and Japan must be forthcoming about what progress is being made."

That's right, China is still finding Japan's WMD in their own country from World War 2 (62 years ago)! I found this in a Chinese newspaper from last week:

A 1997 international convention requires Japan to remove thousands of chemical weapons it abandoned in China by 2007, but Tokyo has asked for a five-year extension. Japan has removed 37,000 chemical weapons, but an estimated 660,000 are still believed to remain in China.

Japan launched its first excavation in Guangzhou in 2005, after three Chinese people were sickened in the city by inhaling poison gas from what were believed to be chemical weapons abandoned by the former Japanese military in June 2005…

Needless to say, the shrill declarations that the WMD episode was just a big lie ("Bush lied - people died") is both ignorant of the available documentation and historically naive.