GIMME SOME TRUTH. Interesting take on the WMD question from, of all people, Sgt. Stryker, who is generally as hardline on Iraq as they come. He starts out predictably enough:

Not even France claimed that Saddam didn't possess chemical weapons. Their contention was that UN inspectors backed by U.S. Forces in Kuwait (at U.S. taxpayer expense I might add) was enough to contain Saddam. No one on the Security Council then seriously believed that Saddam had disarmed, and I still don't.

But then the worm of doubt creeps in:

Something is not adding up here. Why would the Iraqis fail to account for tons of nerve agents and other chemical weapons, and then in the late 90's secretly destroy them? It would be in Saddam's vested interests to have destroyed any weapons in full view of the world, thus removing our primary cause for invasion. I mean, why comply with the UN accords without telling the UN about it? If Saddam had disarmed in secret, then having done so must go down in history as one of the stupidest, most self-defeating acts in history.

The whole point of the weapons inspectors was not to find banned weapons, but to verify the voluntary destruction of said weapons by Iraq. I'm suspicious that some sort of geo-political game or grand-deception is being played out here, exactly what I'm not sure yet.

It does seem strange, doesn't it? It would also seem strange that, having allegedly amassed weapons that were a clear and present danger to civilization itself, Saddam didn't use any of them as his country was overrun by enemy forces. Wouldn't the invasion of one's capital be an umistakable cue to break out the mustard gas?

I haven't heard a satisfying explanation for any of this, either. Some people, of course, are more easily satisfied, and they appear to be carrying the day, public-opinion wise.

I had dinner tonight with a friend who had been reading through some Lyndon LaRouche stuff. My reaction was, look, even if the guy is onto something, without a sackful of extremely hard evidence, as opposed to instincts and inductive reasoning, he can't ever bring us clarity -- he'll only bring us a heightened paranoia that exacerbates any problem he might have wanted to solve.

It's a sad state of affairs when most people with any brains simply take for granted that the Administration can't be trusted -- more sad, even, than the eagerness of many other people, some with brains, to take whatever this Adminstration says without even the tiniest grain of salt. The way things are going, between a fucked-up economy and a fucked-up Middle East, a lot of people will start wondering how the hell it came to this, and unless someone in a position of responsibility starts dishing out some truth, the voices that will come roaring out of the demos will make LaRouche sound like Hubert Humphrey.