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Whenever I hear of "weapons of mass destruction", I think of ICBMs or giant factories producing toxic greenish gas. But what do you know, according to the White House, WMDs can just be picked up and hidden away like that. Or can they?

It wasn't all that long ago that Colin Powell stood up before the U.N. to say that Saddam Hussein had hundreds of tons of chemicals, just waiting to be used against anybody who so much as looked cross-eyed at him. Add that to some tantalizing reports that on of Osama's bodyguards had medical treatment in Baghdad after a leaving Afghanistan one step ahead of American humvees.

There's only one teensy weensy problem here. Where are the chemicals?

Now Saddam Hussein is a fairly intelligent man. He watched T.V., read world newspapers, and kept pretty good tabs on events. He knew as of February that war with the U.S. was certainty. He also knew that the stated American goal was "regime change," a nice fancy term for him being dead, gone, or both.

There's one other thing about Saddam: he's not known for restraint. In the war with Iran in the 1980s, he used chemical weapons just as often as he could. When he suppressed the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions in Iraq in 1991, tens of thousands were killed.

So why then would a man with a history of using any and all means possible in wars, knowing full well that his job and neck are on the line, fail to use every trick he had. Including, if one believes the White House, those several hundred tons of chemicals?

What we know is the he did not use them. There was no red line around Baghdad which once breached by American troops, triggered the release of nerve gas, athrax, or some other weapon of mass destruction. To this day, with millions of dollars offered in reward money, neither Saddam, nor a banned weapon has turned up.

Of course, the White House likes to say that Iraq's a big place, and finding weapons takes time. Maybe that's true. It still doesn't satifactorily explain why a man with a long history of brutality should fail to avail himself of a weapon so allegedly deadly, were it in his grasp. The most dangerous item found to date is indeed the radioactive garbage looted from a power plant that the Israeli air force bombed in 1981. If WMDs were indeed so important, one wonders why the nation's sole supply of Uranium remained unguarded weeks after President Bush announced victory.

Furthermore, the more details about this alleged weapons are demanded, the fuzzier the whole thing becomes. Since the "end" of the invasion, not a single document has been released that gives details on the Iraq's WMDs. It isn't as if the demand suddenly dried up. Both Bush and Prime Minister Blair are asked daily about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. If they have information, why withhold it? They have much to gain from silencing critics, and nothing to lose.

It is amusing that governments which spent five months in an organized campaign to convince the world of Iraq's dangerous weapons should be unconcerned about those weapons after the invasion finished. These weapons could be deadly in the hands of terrorists, right? Then why aren't there thousands of inspectors scouring Iraq from end to end? The last inspection team returned to the U.S. over 4 months ago. It found no weapons.

No, it's time to face reality. The Bush administration didn't find any WMDs, and at this date, they seem to have stopped caring, except to wish that the press would shut up about the whole thing. The press nearly did, and if it wasn't for media outlets like the BBC, the term WMD would probably be about as far gone from the limelight as the Condit-Levy scandal.

This leaves 2 possibilities. Either they thought there were weapons and were wrong, or they didn't think there were weapons, and simply lied. So either this country went into this war at the behest of ignoramuses, or at the behest of liars. Either way, that makes it high time for regime change here. Time to send George back to the private sector where he belongs.

Send comments or questions to zdjahromi@zgmail.com (remove the letter 'z' from the address before sending).

Pages last updated: July 17, 2005

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