More Yellow Times -- "Weapons of Mass Deception"

Yellow Times picks up a few statistics on what happened to those WMDs.

Washington Post On March 16, 2003: "Administration officials, in making the case against Iraq, repeatedly have failed to mention the considerable amount of documented weapons destruction that took place in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. … In that period, under U.N. supervision, Iraq destroyed 817 of 819 proscribed medium-range missiles, 14 launchers, 9 trailers and 56 fixed missile-launch sites. It also destroyed 73 of 75 chemical or biological warheads and 163 warheads for conventional explosives. U.N. inspectors also supervised destruction of 88,000 filled and unfilled chemical munitions, more than 600 tons of weaponized and bulk chemical weapons agents, 4,000 tons of precursor chemicals and 980 pieces of equipment considered key to production of such weapons."

The amounts described here and corroborated by the United Nations would seem to constitute a large percentage of Iraq's WMD or, at least, significant disarmament. Yet over the past year, Iraq's noncompliance was one of the Bush administration's key arguments in support of its invasion plans. In fact, President Bush has referred to WMD at least 200 times in public appearances in the last 16 months alone, invariably mentioning Iraq's reticence to cooperate with the United Nations and the United States. On March 17th, addressing the nation, Bush said, "Since then [the Gulf War] … We have sent hundreds of weapons inspectors to oversee the disarmament of Iraq. Our good faith has not been returned. ... Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again -- because we are not dealing with peaceful men." But such powerful words seem to contradict the fact that Iraq has significantly disarmed since the Gulf War, even if it wasn't "completely" in Washington's eyes.

Washington's expert use of the term "weapons of mass destruction," then, has, through exaggeration and manipulation, created a distorted picture of Iraq's military capability, which then created a much-needed pretext for war -- a preemptive war at that -- and has now proven to be disposable as, suddenly, the phrase that used to be on everyone's lips has become the hottest non-topic.