Smoking Gun Found In Iraq

Interesting timing on that "smoking gun" story about the 1991 chemical shells from Iraq. Early Monday I wrote a review of "The Dark Side" which included the following passage: "The manipulation of the intelligence stuff [in The Dark Side] was not new to me. I had already seen "Uncovered: The Story of the Iraq War" so I knew how damning that was. "Uncovered" did have one additional bit of information. In one of Bush's speeches he listed all the chemical stockpiles known from the first Gulf War and then repeated that they were unaccounted for. "Uncovered" pointed out that some of those chemical weapons only had a shelf life of a couple of months, and couldn't be around nearly ten years later, but that was the only other detail I wish "The Dark Side" had included."
Senator Santorum, the Drudge Report, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh are all breathlessly pointing to these shells as proof that the reasons we went into Iraq were correct. It's the same old scenario: Lie and get as many people as they can to buy into it. I'm proud that I just happened to address this topic prior to this latest deception by the Far Right. The irony is that these shells are a smoking gun. The administration knew these weapons had degraded since 1991 to the point where they were useless. So the fact that President Bush cited them in one of his speeches prior to the war, without mentioning the shelf-life angle, just proves they were willing to lie us into the war. These shells are the smoking gun, all right, just not the smoking gun these Republican phonies want you to believe.