Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Palpably Absurd. posted by Richard Seymour
The epitaph: "We are asked now to accept that in the last few years - contrary to all intelligence -Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." (Tony Blair, 18th March 2003).
The Prime Minister has walked into the biggest bear trap since Bob Dylan toured Afghanistan singing Everybody Must Get Stoned. Admitting that WMDs may never be found, he said that Sadddam might have destroyed them - a claim he told us last year was "palpably absurd". He told news reports that Saddam Hussein "may have removed, hidden or even destroyed those weapons - we do not know and we have to wait for the Iraq Survey Group to complete its findings - but what I would not accept is that he was not a threat, and a threat in WMD terms".
Hidden them? Imagine the bugger, scuttling around with WMDs in the back of a couple of lorries, scorching across the desert at 2am to sink them to the bottom of the Euphrates or sell them across the border. Only, almost every face on that infamous deck of "regime change" cards has now been caught up with, and not one of them has offered a clue as to where they might be hidden. At any rate, I don't quite know what kind of weapons you could easily 'hide' in Iraq given that it has been spied on relentlessly, comprehensively and non-stop for twelve years. Everything they thought was a hidden weapons facility or dump turned out to be a useless husk - which doesn't exactly amaze, since these are the same people who told us that an aspirin factory in Khartoum was actually developing chemical weapons.
The Prime Minister is possibly the last person in Britain to believe that Hussein was "a threat in WMD terms". He is sad, and delusional, clinging for dear life to the wafer-thin palimpsest that he so assuredly rode into war on the back of last year. I almost feel sorry for having to vote his ass out next election.