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February 09, 2004
Orwell's war
Those goalposts just keep moving. Fascinating to see the way the anti-war line has changed in order to deal with the inconvenient things that David Kay actually said which showed that Saddam was actively working on WMD. The former spy David Tomlinson deals with this in the Guardian by redefining the casus belli once again and then redefining WMD themselves. Forget the UN resolutions; now, apparently, the war the war 'could only be justified if we find evidence of strategically significant WMD.' 'Strategically significant' is clearly a strategically significant phrase as he repeats it. So what does it mean? Well, it appears to boil down to a 'deployable nuclear warhead'. Anything else is not strategically significant, it seems, and so doesn't count. So chemical weapons? Mere piffle! They are only 'tactical battlefield weapons - and poor ones at that. Illegal, yes. Nasty, yes. But WMD? No.' So he redefines WMD to be only the one weapon Saddam definitely didn't have. And lo and behold, this objective truth-seeker who inveighs against spin and 'cherry-picking' the evidence (tut tut Mr Scarlett) somehow manages completely to omit biological weapons altogether from his inventory. Are these WMD? He doesn't tell us. Could that be, perhaps, because Dr Kay found clear evidence of dozens of covert biological programmes and recorded the fact that several stashes of biological agent were known to have gone missing? A small amount or ricin or VX nerve gas or anthrax can kill a very large number of people. But no doubt Mr Tomlinson regards that as not 'strategically significant', and therefore not WMD at all. Posted by melanie at February 9, 2004
Comments
David Tomlinson - 'nuff said. Hardly the most inspiring of individuals for consistency. Posted by: Romulus at February 9, 2004 07:19 PMIt seems Tomlinson has run afoul of the "symmetrical"/"asymmetrical" distinction, which has bedevilled much of the debate on the war (e.g., the notion of an "imminent threat" applies to traditional, troop-to-troop, symmetrical warfare - not terroristic attacks by clandestine squads). If he won't credit anything short of a nuke as representing an authentic WMD, then clearly he refuses (or has failed) to take seriously the exigencies of the age of "Mega-terror" (Walter Laqueur's locution), of which many of us believe Sept. 11 '01 heralded the advent. As many "Cassandras" have emphasized, the extent of devastation wrought by a weaponized, biological agent could be (nearly) astronomical. Posted by: Paul Craddick at February 10, 2004 01:11 AMWe do know that he was making facilities and relationships available to Al quaida and others in this regard. |
