…from across the pond. (Why do we Americans get stuck with British idiots like Andy Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens over here?)
The issue of WMDs is not only laughable - given the inability of Bush and Blair to produce these mythical beasts – but deeply deceptive. The following article presents more evidence why the UN – an organization that has better credibility than either of the “BB” regimes right now – should have their weapon inspectors on the ground in Iraq.
If the first casualty of war is truth, then language itself sustains the heaviest collateral damage, as Orwell used to point out (before "collateral damage" proved his point by entering the vocabulary of poisonous euphemism). The Iraq war has produced its own rich crop of Newspeak, but the choicest of all is the phrase "weapons of mass destruction".
Even the most credulous supporters of Tony Blair's war are beginning to see they were sold a pup. MPs angrily demand evidence of the WMDs, which they, in their innocence, believed were the reason for the war, rather than its flimsy pretext, while the prime minister insists that WMDs will be found.
But what are they anyway? The very phrase "weapons of mass destruction" is of recent coinage, and a specious one. It replaced "ABC weapons", for atomic, biological and chemical, which was neater, although already misleading as it conflated types of weaponry quite different in kind and in destructive capacity. WMD is even more empty and dishonest as a concept.…
While terrorism is murderous, it mostly remains technologically primitive. Three people were killed in Tel Aviv on Tuesday by a suicide bomber's belt of explosive and metal scraps, and the IRA have shown how bloodthirsty "spectaculars" can be mounted with nothing more than fertiliser, sugar, and condoms for the timers.
As for the greatest spectacular of all, Blair has repeatedly linked September 11 with the threat of WMDs. But the 3,000 victims in New York weren't killed by WMDs of any kind, they were murdered by a dozen fanatics armed with box cutters. Although it has been irritating subsequently to have the contents of one's sponge bag confiscated at the airport in the name of security, that scarcely makes a pair of nail scissors a WMD.
The truth is that "weapons of mass destruction" is a concept defined by the person using it. "I like a drink, you are a drunk, he is an alcoholic," runs the old conjugation. Now there's another: "We have defence forces, you have dangerous arms, he has weapons of mass destruction." As usual, it depends who you are.
(Thanks to these folks.)
12:27:01 PM 
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