When Bush talked of not finding WMDs, he used the phrase "stockpiles of WMDs." This made me wonder, as nobody had said anything about stockpiles of WMDs before.
We've been finding caches of conventional weapons, and we've been looking for WMDs, even finding things like the 7 pound block of cyanide salts in the safehouse of known Iraqi poison specialist last week. I would think that cyanide salts would be a WMD, but that got very little press.
So, are we now looking for stockpiles of WMDs? What makes a stockpile? If bio-weapons are microscopic, how big does its "stockpile" have to be?
The press has twisted the burden of proof from Iraq proving that they destroyed their WMDs to Bush proving that they existed. UN resolution 1441 was about enforcement and Bush also claimed that going into Iraq was about enforcement of 1441, but the press now make it out as a pre-emptive strike against an imminent threat.
And what of the humanitarian arguments? The press has conveniently pushed those aside, claiming that they were secondary, and that Bush made the weapons the dominant reason for going to war. I can't help but think how the debate would have gone if we decided to go into Rwanda to stop the killing. Now that was a humanitarian effort that nobody wanted any part of, and yet they all wrung their hands over it when they chose to go into Kosovo for humanitarian reasons. They all acknowledged that there were no vital interests in Kosovo, nor were there any in Rwanda, but they were bound by humanity to go into Kosovo to stop the genocide that they failed to stop in Rwanda. So why are they back to ignoring the humanitarian disaster in Iraq that was Hussein's torture chambers and mass graves and depraved regime?
This is what I mean about the press moving the goalposts to take away the wins. Unless Bush makes an absolutely spectacular save, he can count on the press to never acknowledge what he does.
-PJ
I believe David Kay said no "large stockpiles" of WMD had been found.