Month: September 2003

More saber-rattling for the benefit of Syria the last few days. The timing is impeccable; nothing will tell Syria we’re serious like making threats at the same time we’re telling Iran to shape up. Cause we’ve got all those available troops sitting around doing nothing.

In related news, the White House slip of the day comes from Press Secretary Scott McClellan:

David Kaye, who’s leading the Iraq survey group, which is — they’re interviewing people, they’re talking to Iraqis, they’re gathering all the intelligence to pull together a complete picture of Iran — of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program and their weapons of mass destruction.

And what about North Korea?

Hey, wasn’t Ann Coulter gonna start keeping a blog?

The date on that first post in the archives, by the way, is a lie. That sucker’s been there since late June, when they first claimed Ann was about to start blogging.

I love Sundays. You get talking heads on Sundays. Here’s Secretary Rumsfeld on that 87 billion dollars.

“On the other hand, if you cast it [$87 billion dollars kplzthx] directly, that the $87 billion is part of the global war on terror, and that it is a lot better to be fighting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan than it is in the United States, and that the effort is one that has not as its purpose, I think, as you phrased it, rebuilding Iraq.  Iraqis are going to have to rebuild Iraq.”

Well, yeah, it’s better to be fighting terrorists in Iraq if you don’t happen to be an Iraqi. Sorry about chosing your country as our battlefield against Al Qaeda, guys. And you can just rebuild your own country, cause that 87 billion is battlefield money.

Mind you, this is not what the President said. Someone’s getting way too far off message!

The Sunday London Times reported today that the US/UK WMD report is being shelved. (Here’s the direct link, but it’s only useful if you live in the UK or want to pay some money.) 1,400 people spent four months scouring Iraq for evidence of WMD, but found nothing. So little did they find that they won’t even publish the report.

Now, at the beginning of August, David Kay was talking up his progress. At the time, it was pretty clear that he was setting up the argument that Saddam was maintaining the “capacity” for WMD, rather than having any actual weapons, despite what Bush said before the war.

Now it looks like he was even lying (or sorely mistaken) about that.

I can’t think why anyone on either side of the debate about Iraq wouldn’t want that report to be published. Or is this more of that information that’s too dangerous for ordinary citizens to know?