For anyone who cared to look at the issue logically, it was obvious that the question of Saddam’s putative weapons of mass destruction would be decided on day one of the war. As I said, the day before the war started,
the “best” time for Saddam to use them is before the US attack commences, which means almost immediately … If, in the face of an invasion aimed at killing him or seizing him for a war crimes trial, Saddam still refrains from using WMDs, only two conclusions are possible:
(a) there were no weapons; or
(b) they were not, even in the most drastic circumstances, a threat to the US
This is clear enough, but still, some reasonable people might have taken a little longer to be convinced, and, as we’ve seen, there’s still the possibility of a leftover test-tube in a fridge somewhere. But after six months, anyone who continues to think that illegal weapons in working order are going to be discovered is revealing more about their own psychology than about the real world. What then, is to be said about the report that Polish troops had discovered four French Roland missiles, manufactured in 2003 and delivered to Iraq at a time when massive US forces were already surrounding the country, and when the capture of such missiles would have utterly discredited the French government?
This story was so unlikely that any rational person would have dismissed it out of hand, especially in the presence of a clear alternative explanation, that the missiles had been delivered before the imposition of sanctions in 1990* , and the Poles just got the dates wrong (as they subsequently admitted). In its combination of wish fulfilment and total implausibility, it was on a par with the various rumours that Jews/Muslims/highly placed Americans had been tipped off before September 11 and stayed away from the World Trade Center.
So, who fell for it? As far as I can tell, a large proportion of warbloggerdom bought the story and hardly any debunked it.
At the top of the list, there’s, Instapundit, LGF, samizdata and Kevin Donahue
Google reveals so many suckers for this story that it’s impossible to list them all, but I estimate the number must be into the hundreds, even excluding those who reproduced the story without comment. A few linked to the subsequent retraction, but mostly in a way that failed to admit that the original report had been completely falsified. For example, Instapundit is still suggesting that the Polish retraction is part of a coverup.
Hat-tip to Roger Ailes whose link to Instapundit I followed.
*That is, in the days when Saddam was “a mass murderer, but our mass murderer”.
John Quiggin 
Thanks for this, John. I saw the original report on Lateline (I think) but haven’t yet seen anything refuting it either on TV or in the print media.
There is more to add.
If Hussein did really pose a threat to the world then the WMDs would have had to be ‘weaponised’ ( I hate these americanisms).
This must mean a missile silo.
There never was one.
If this was the case then he may have posed a threat to a nearby country however I never heard of any country crying for help.
Lastly there is the myth that Saddam could have sold WMDs to AQ or similar.
A history of AQ shows it to be a very shrewd organisation when it comes to business.
To expect it to buy UNTESTED WMDS from Hussein is fanciful. On the other getting untested WMDS very cheap or even for nothing at the end of a losing war would be much more to AQ’s practices.
It is good that Hussein is gone but why is Iraq a favoured nation and not Zimbabwe, Syria etc?
Homer maybe we can ‘do’ the others one at a time? You know, cross-apply Bjorn Lomborg’s principle of prioritization.
The war may, or may not, have strategic and moral value. Whether this is worth the $300 bill cost is debateable.
What is not debateable is that the warbloggers mostly act as unpaid agitpropagators for the Republican or Liberal party. They were mainly interested in settling domestic ideological scores with peaceniks. (I was a not very honourable exception to this rule)
It follows that the wbloggers cannot concede that the war’s rationale was bogus without undermining what ever other subtextual ideological axes that they have been grinding. Embarassing questions about absent WMDS must brushed aside.
In that sense the warblogger’s attitude to the war was merely a microscosmic replication of the Republican party’s political exploitation of mass anger over the 911.
Still does not explain why Saddam simply didn’t submit to full and clear weapons inspections as South Africa and Ukraine did.
This put him in violation of 1441.
This war was Saddam’s fault.
Greg,
I am sorry for being dumb but whart are you saying?
I am only a Bjorn again christian!!
Homer, you’re quite right to quiz me on that point, which I realize now was hopelessly obscure. No criticism of you was intended and I don’t think any can be construed. I took your last sentence to be about the hypocrisy of our governments pretending to ‘care’ enough for the Iraqi people to ‘liberate’ them from Hussein, yet clearly not ‘caring’ enough of all the other oppressed peoples of the world – such as the countries you exampled – to do the same for them. Your point being that this was another argument against GW2. Apologies if I got you wrong – please feel free to put me straight on this – but that’s how I read it.
This point, as I interpreted it, was very interesting because it reminded me of the speculation early in the war that Bush and his Neo-Conservative (neocon) advisers might have a ‘hit list’. If so, then they might well use exactly the point you make as an argument in support of ranking States that sponsor terrorism according to ‘wickedness’, ‘threat posed’, etc, and then working down the list and ‘doing’ them in similar fashion to the way Afghanistan and now Iraq have been ‘done’. This may be an annoying point but perhaps one to be aware of?
PrQ is pretty disgusted with Bjorn Lomborg and has attacked him in a number of blogs – to the extent he may even think Lomborg really leans so far to the Right as to actually be a clandestine neocon! Lomborg has suggested what I think PrQ believes to be an inappropriate ranking of environmental objectives (ie, Lomborg ranks Kyoto infeasibly low on his priority list, for inappropriate reasons). The blog relevant to all this is here. If you are interested, you could also have a look at PrQ’s Financial Review article of Thursday 9 October, page 70. It’s all very good reading.
No I was merely curious at what were saying.
The Neo-cons have not one idea of what pervades the Islamists ( for want of a better term) understanding of Islam and through the invasion of Iraq have made terrorism worse!