Still no nukes or chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. So where’s the scandal?
By: Hank Kalet
Molly Ivins turns her attention to the issue of weapons of mass destruction or as I called them in the headline to my Post column, Dispatches this week, "weapons of mass distortion."
Writing on TomPaine.com, the Texas firebrand offers this on-target assessment of what should be shaping up as a major scandal, but isn’t:
"Look, if there are no WMDs in Iraq, it means either our government lied us to us in order to get us into an unnecessary war, or the government itself was disastrously misinformed by an incompetent intelligence apparatus," she writes. "In either case, it’s a terribly serious situation."
She goes on to question why the mainstream media has remained silent or, worse, has decided that so-called WMDs are not an issue anyway.
"What I cannot believe is that respected journalists, most notably Tom Friedman, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, would simply dismiss the nonexistent WMDs as though it made no difference," she writes. "Of course it matters if our government lies to us.
"Why do you think people were so angry at Lyndon Johnson over the Gulf of Tonkin? At Richard Nixon over the ‘secret war’ in Cambodia? Even at Bill Clinton over the less-cosmic matter of whether he had sex with ‘that woman.’ If it makes no difference whether the government lied, why is Friedman a journalist? Why does journalism exist at all?"
Mark Morford, in his Notes & Errata column in the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday, also raises the issue of those invisible weapons, but he does so with a nasty, sarcastic edge:
"Turns out it really was all a big joke after all," he writes. "The war, that is. All a big fat nasty murderous oil-licking lie, a sneaky little power-mad game with you as the sucker and the world as the pawn and BushCo as the slithery war thug, the dungeon master, the prison daddy. You really have to laugh. Because it’s just so wonderfully ridiculous. In a rather disgusting, soul-draining sort of way.
"See, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No WMDs at all. Isn’t that great? What’s more: There never were. Ha-ha-ha. Gotcha!"

