Let the Disinformation Begin!

Posted on May 18, 2004 in Occupation of Iraq

It’s politics Tuesday! No, I swear. Yesterday’s articles about Troy and antiwar films weren’t political.

They’re running back and forth, waving their arms, crying “There are no WMDs! We were fooled! There are WMDs! We were fooled!”

Colin Powell told the world yesterday that he had been wrong to tell the world that Iraq had WMDs.

Then, the right wing media — eager to find any WMD in Iraq jumped for joy when traces of Sarin turned up in a fizzled attack on U.S. soldiers. Ohboyohboyohboyohboyboyboy! you could hear them exclaim across the bandwidth. “We’ve found WMDs!” Well, not exactly. The BBC yawned:

[Iraq] claimed only to have filled a small number of such shells with binary nerve agent as an experimental project, which the Iraqis said, never entered full-scale production.

Nobody knows how many such shells were manufactured or how many may exist today.

These shells could be over a decade old and the chemicals they contain could have degraded.

But looked at more broadly, is this the first sign, as the US and British governments claimed, that Iraq really did have chemical weapons?

One shell clearly does not make a chemical arsenal.

UN Inspector Hans Blix yawned, too, and postulated that the shell had come from a waste dump.

Of course, the donkey driving the spin machine has been whipped into motion. “Saddam had WMDs!” they exclaim. “Bush was right! Our Lord and Savior was Right! Re-elect him in the fall!” Ultra-reactionary Worldnet Daily proposed that the shell was among those that had been hidden by Saddam before the war.

Don’t be fooled. But do ask: how come the U.S. inspectors who combed the land repeatedly did not find this gem? Blix’s Gulf War 1 waste dump theory is the soundest proposition issued so far. Another possibility is that the two chemicals used in the attack came from outside the country, brought there by an Al Qaeda operative or perhaps a U.S. infiltrator. In the wake of last week’s events and the terrible shame of Abu Ghraib, let us not be too credulous of claims coming from the wing-wang Right. We must remember that this attack fizzled, suggesting that the materials were too old to be effective; this credits Blix’s Gulf War relic theory. It’s also important to point out that the Right lost its head long ago and is desperate for any confirmation, no matter how slight, of its hallucinations. There have been suggestions, too, that the United States has been bringing in WMDs into the country.

Given the frantic response out of Washington by the Bush Administration and its supporting illiterati on the WWW, we shouldn’t discount these theories out of hand. The facts are these: Bush stole the year 2000 election. He lied about Hussein having weapons programs and huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. His minions have a track record of twisting the facts to suit their demonic agenda.

Trust them? Fat chance.