First off, Instapundit gives us a roundup of some of the latest, encouraging news to come out of Iraq, while noting that we often don’t hear about these the positive developments from our Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets. Summarizing Fred Kaplan’s latest piece from The New Republic, Instapundit hits on THE crucial question: “Kaplan wonders if journalists are so habituated to negative spin that they can’t, or won’t, recognize good news.”
I think that’s it, exactly.
Next, the always entertaining and insightful Christopher Hitchens weighs in with a startling piece about Iraqi WMD, “This was not looting: how did Saddam’s best weapons plants get plundered?”
Hitchens reveals that the New York Times has broken a major story: that several Iraqi weapons sites WERE, in fact, WMD-capable, if not WMD-containing, prior to March, 2003. And yet, in typical fashion, the ramifications of this revelation are being studiously ignored.
Furthermore, Hitchens goes on to reveal that the Times reporters have uncovered a systematic and pre-planned removal operation which was undertaken from April-May, 2003. Iin other words, WMD capability and any existing WMD were removed by Hussein’s military people before the US inspection teams showed up.
The overall pattern of the plundered sites was summarized thus, by reporters James Glanz and William J. Broad:
“The kinds of machinery at the various sites included equipment that could be used to make missile parts, chemical weapons or centrifuges essential for enriching uranium for atom bombs. ”
My first question is this: How can it be that, on every page of every other edition for months now, the New York Times has been stating categorically that Iraq harbored no weapons of mass destruction? And there can hardly be a comedy-club third-rater or MoveOn.org activist in the entire country who hasn’t stated with sarcastic certainty that the whole WMD fuss was a way of lying the American people into war. So now what? Maybe we should have taken Saddam’s propaganda seriously, when his newspaper proudly described Iraq’s physicists as “our nuclear mujahideen.”
My second question is: What’s all this about “looting”? The word is used throughout the long report, but here’s what it’s used to describe. “In four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003 … teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. … ‘The first wave came for the machines,’ Dr Araji said. ‘The second wave, cables and cranes.’ ” Perhaps hedging the bet, the Times authors at this point refer to “organized looting.”
But obviously, what we are reading about is a carefully planned military operation. The participants were not panicked or greedy civilians helping themselves—which is the customary definition of a “looter,” especially in wartime. They were mechanized and mobile and under orders, and acting in a concerted fashion. Thus, if the story is factually correct—which we have no reason at all to doubt—then Saddam’s Iraq was a fairly highly-evolved WMD state, with a contingency plan for further concealment and distribution of the weaponry in case of attack or discovery.
I’d love to be able to expect a wide dissemination and aggressive follow-up by the big media outlets on this super-important story.
I’m not holding my breath, however.
March 28th, 2005 | Global War On Terror, Jihad Watch