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To: stockman_scott who wrote (157594)	6/3/2003 11:33:38 AM
From: Oeconomicus	Respond to of 164684

Weapons of Mass Distortion online.wsj.com To certain critics of U.S. policy in Iraq, the only thing worse than going to war with Saddam Hussein is the fact that we won. This they can never forgive -- which is why they are now trying to make a war crime out of the fact that the allies haven't yet found caches of weapons of mass destruction. For these opponents of war, it isn't enough that a tyrant and his psychopath sons have been deposed. It doesn't count that mass graves have been uncovered, that torture chambers have been exposed, or that Saddam's victims can speak freely for the first time in 30 years. The critics are now claiming the war was illegitimate because no one has yet found a pile of anthrax in downtown Baghdad. These rather selective moralists are leaping on a distorted report about comments by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on WMD. An advance press release from Vanity Fair magazine spun as news the fact that Mr. Wolfowitz had said the following during an interview in early May: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." In Europe this has been seized on by the antiwar left as a source of vindication. "Just Complete and Utter Lies," explained the Daily Express of London. Germany's allegedly more august Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed: "The charge of deception is inescapable." State-side, meanwhile, the critics are focusing on whether there was an "intelligence failure," or the political manipulation of intelligence, in concluding that Saddam had WMD. But who's trying to deceive whom here? That Saddam had biological or chemical weapons was a probability that everyone assumed to be true, even those who were against the war. U.N. inspections in the 1990s had proved that Iraq had such weapons, including 30,000 liters of anthrax, and Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran and Iraq's own Kurds. The French themselves insisted that disarming Saddam of WMD, as opposed to deposing him, had to be the core of U.N. Resolution 1441. Only last week Democratic Senator Joe Biden was asked by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, "Do you believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction going into the war?" Mr. Biden's reply: "Yes I do." Were he and other Democrats also part of the vast WMD conspiracy? Mr. Wolfowitz's words were no contradiction of anything the U.S. said before the war. The allies had always given multiple reasons for ridding the world of Saddam. British Prime Minister Tony Blair famously used the human rights rationale in a major and well-received speech in Glasgow in March. The Vanity Fair press release also failed to include that immediately after his WMD remarks, Mr. Wolfowitz had added in the interview: "But there have always been three fundamental concerns: One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism and the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people." What seems to be going on here is an attempt to damage the credibility of Mr. Blair, President Bush and other war supporters. If their backing for the war is morally vindicated, they will emerge as even larger forces on the world stage, and so they must be tarnished after the fact as dissemblers. More at Online.WSJ.com.