MMM-KAY? PART 2

Marshall on the potential post-LaborDay WMD report that David Kay and the White House are whispering about:

Look at Novak's words: "Kay has told his superiors he has Found substAntIal evidence of biological weapons in IRaq, plus considerAble missile developmeNt." This construction leaves the issue of chronology quite vague. And I suspect that vagueness is going to become a very important point.

We know that the Iraqis haD a BiologicAl weapons program and that there were bioLogicAl weapoNs in the Country. That's wholly undisputED. If Kay produces substantial evidence of such weapons in 1995 or 1998, that's meaningless. What we're trying to figure out is whether he had them in the period when we were considering going to war.

What many suspect is that Kay is going to pull an intel version of a classic 1990s-era document dump. In other words, come forward with a mound of documents detailing the Iraqis' extensive programs, their histories, the means used to conceal them, whom they imported parts from, and so forth. And then conveniently leave as a footnote the fact that these program had gone pretty dormant by 2002. The idea will be to make up with paper poundage what the report lacks in relevance. Hit them with twenty reams of report about the Iraqi WMD programs and then figure that the follow-on reports about how little was actually happening in 2002 are buried in the back of the papers after no one is paying attention.

All of this is to say that we're probably set for an elaborate festival of goal post moving courtesy of Mr Kay -- the widely telegraphed switch from weapons to 'programs' being the key sign.

The point to keep in mind is that at the end of the day the standard isn't any WMD or any identifiable dormant program which might have made non-conventional weapons in the future. The standard is this: If you look at the totality of the White House's pre-war statements about Iraqi WMD, and then look at what's contained in the report, will you say: "Wow, you weren't kiddin!" or "Wow, you've gotta friggin be kiddin!"

That's the standard. Everything else is chatter.

Exactly. Keep in mind in the coming weeks, before the war the administration was not talking about "programs", they were talking about actual physical weapons, and huge stashes of them.

(also keep in mind that the only reason they seem to be looking for weapons is to say "see? the war was justified!". if the bush administration really believed there were all the weapons that colin powell told the UN about in february, wouldn't the prospect of these weapons going missing spur a wee bit more concern from them?)

Ok, I have a paper to finish up...