Bloggledygook: The Powerful And Obnoxious Odor Of Mendacity.

A gold star to anyone who can mention the allusion of the title.

I had a long, heated discussion yesterday (which took up way too much time) with a guy I like and generally respect but who has swallowed the whole "Bush lied (you know the rest)" meme that has been floating around since the beginning of the Iraq Campaign. He refused to admit that it was possible that the cassus belli (hey! twice in one day!) could have been anything but a series of high-flying lies told by the administration. Most important to him was the lie that WMDs were the one and only reason to go to war, which i was able to refute in about seven minute on Google when I returned home. I emailed the links to him. Haven't heard from him yet.

Today, I got some new ammunition from two separate sources:

In Commentary, Norman Podhoretz writes the definitive article on the many lies that have been told about Iraq and WMDs. Podhoretz lists the many soft and hard lies being perpetuated from the administration's war critics and eviscerates each one. He starts with the claim that Bush just plain lied about WMDs, when the clear evidence is that he, and just about everybody else believed that Saddam was making nasty things in the woodshed.

In the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with “high confidence” was that

Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and—yes—France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix—who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past—lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Blix now claims that he was only being “cautious” here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration “misled itself” in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.

The entire article needs to be read, because it's devastating and a concise answer to the question of who's zoomin' who. Three guesses what Podhoretz thinks of Joe Wilson.

What piqued my attention is the sentence included here about Hans Blix. Mr Blix is emblematic, I think, of the united front working to re-frame the argument on Iraq by re-writing history. The problem with Mr Blix, and Messrs Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Kennedy, Byrd and Mses Clinton and Pelosi, among many more, is that they never thought that their rhetoric slamming Saddam and their empty saber-waving would ever come to anything. To this day, the radicalized wing of the Democratic Party can't believe that their bluff was called. Indeed, they must have thought, as did so many during the Age of Bill, that Bush would be content to stamp his feet and lob a few cruise missiles at night shift custodians.

This is old news, of course, but it is good to have all the facts in one article. I'm going to print off a copy and carry it with me, just in case.

The other thing I am reading is an advance copy of a chapter of Richard Miniter's new book, Disinformation. In this book, Miniter looks at the WMD issue and brings up some interesting details:

On June 23, 2004, U.S. forces seized 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium, the kind used to make, uh, atomic bombs.

U.S. DoE experts removed 1,000 radioactive materials in "powdered form" which could be easily dispersed in dirty bombs.

A Polish General in Iraq reported that his troops had received tips that chemical weapons had been sold to terrorists on the black market and had been buried to avoid detection.Military Officials then bought seventeen warheads for $5,000 each to keep them out of the hands of the so-called insurgents.

August 8, 2005 1,500 gallons of chemical agents were found in Mosul. There is a dispute going on right now as to whether they were produced during or after Saddam, but why haven't we read more about this?

It will be interesting to see what the counter arguments are, but from what I can tell, Miniter's work is fairly well researched.

Don't believe the hype.