Lugar on WMD
This interview with Senator Richard Lugar is interesting:
"It seems to me very hard for somebody in Congress to argue with a straight face that he or she was deceived. Anyone who was sitting there throughout the last two years heard all of the arguments that are now being made, had an opportunity to read all the intelligence. There has been nothing new in the arguments...to dredge all of this [up] as somehow a national scandal or people being beguiled or so forth is nonsense unless people are totally naïve.
"I don't know if they will find weapons of mass destruction although my guess is that conventional wisdom is right, eventually we will find some people in Iraq who will tell us what happened...
"Dual use technology, if it is sophisticated, means that you can whip up a batch of anthrax one day and do shampoo the next and get rid of what you did the first day. Americans looking for big facilities and cars and tanks and so forth will be disappointed. That is not the nature of the beast."
I think this last point is significant. I've been wondering what Plan B for the Administration's critics is; i.e., what do they say when the investigation is done and the Administration publishes a report on Iraq's WMD programs? (Theoretically, of course, they could say "I was wrong," but we all know that won't happen.) I think the fall-back position will be a) that we didn't find the volume or scale of chemical and biological weapons that was expected, and b) that there is no evidence that Iraq had imminent plans to use them against us. And the fact that most people have no idea what "weapons of mass destruction" look like when you find them will make this seem plausible.
