Var finns Iraks vapen?

Den amerikanske statsvetaren Robert Kagan är mest känd för sin lysande artikel Power and Weakness som handlar om den växande klyftan mellan Europa och USA. Han skriver också regelbundet krönikor i Washington Post. Häromdagen handlade det om debatten om Iraks försvunna massförstörelsevapen. Han skriver:

There is something surreal about the charges flying that President Bush lied when he claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Yesterday The Post continued the barrage, reporting that Defense Intelligence Agency analysts claimed last September merely that Iraq ”probably” possessed ”chemical agent in chemical munitions” and ”probably” possessed ”bulk chemical stockpiles, primarily containing precursors, but that also could consist of some mustard agent and VX,” a deadly nerve agent.
This kind of ”discrepancy” qualifies as front-page news these days. Why? Not because the Bush administration may have — repeat, may have — exaggerated the extent of knowledge about what Hussein had in his WMD arsenal. No, the critics’ real aim is to prove that, as a New York Times reporter recently put it, ”the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may mean that there never were any in the first place.”

Han fortsätter:

if Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are lying, they’re not alone. They’re part of a vast conspiratorial network of liars that includes U.N. weapons inspectors and reputable arms control experts both inside and outside government, both Republicans and Democrats…
So if you like a good conspiracy, this one’s a doozy. And the best thing about it is that if all these people are lying, there’s only one person who ever told the truth: Saddam Hussein. And now we can’t find him either.

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