WMD in Iraq?

Wingnut buzz not entirely meritless

Brent Bozell from the Media Research Center clearly is a doofus. He is just the latest wingnut to trumpet against the notion that ``Bush lied'' about weapons of mass destruction on the basis of a recent release by Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) of a report describing 500 old, degraded chemical shells located in Iraq.

It's hilarious to watch the wingers get exercised over supposedly-found WMD. Media Matters has done a fine job over the last few days of pointing to ``evidence to the contrary'' to refute the hype.

But at the same time, I think there is a story to be told about these remnants of Saddam's old arsenal. So, while I find the wingnut gesticulations absurd, there is a real story worth telling here, even though they are completely blind to it.

Rightist columnist Kathleen Parker in a piece called ``WMD: Lost and found'' appearing today in the Bangor Daily News, actually had a pretty interesting observation on this story: a ``real political battle...is being waged under the radar between the White House, the intelligence community and Congress'' over the documents that Santorum and Hoekstra obtained.

Because much history of US-Iraq relations has been plowed under in recent years, she has little basis for evaluating the White House response. She laments that ``theories'' about the documents ``have offered little comfort or clarity.'' She's puzzled about why the White House is not ``happy to spread the news'' and why the president is ``quiet''.

I'll help out Ms. Parker tell the story here. I think there are two reasons the White House is not cheering about these documents. One is obvious. They in fact confirm Iraq had only degraded remnant chem arms (not ``mushroom cloud'' producing stuff), just like all the inspectors said, from the UN to Bush's hand-picked guys. That's all well-explained in the Media Matters posts. But what else lurks in these documents is the story about the how Saddam was armed & how he fought Iran in the 1980s--with diplomatic cover from the Reagan & GHW Bush administrations, with US-supplied intel, with materials supplied by international corporations, with clandestine funding using fraudulent banking and agricultural credit schemes. That is the real story, though there is no reason to expect the wingnut crowd to examine it with any honesty.

Thomas Powers had a NYT piece on the Iraqi archives and post-war control of those ``documents'' just as the invasion started. (See this interview from NPR's Fresh Air.) Too bad the media follow-up has been pretty much non-existent.

Update 6/29: Edited for clarity, NPR link added.