Yeah. You know how we “found” that uranium in Iraq, thus Validating Everything Teh Leader Ever Said!!!!
Nothing has emerged to change the basic conclusion of U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, who led a post-invasion effort to find WMD in Iraq. As Kay famously said, “It turns out that we were all wrong.”
No secret weapons caches have emerged. No Iraqi scientists have come forward to speak of advanced weapons programs. None of the trove of regime documents have detailed a WMD effort that posed a near-term threat to the United States and its allies.
So what of the 550 tons of uranium, which was in a raw form known as yellowcake? Well, the first thought that strikes us here at N&S is that if Saddam had all that raw uranium, why would he have been secretly negotiating to buy the exact same thing from Niger, as forged documents purported? One more reason to suspect the Niger caper from the start, something the U.S. government and European intelligence agencies failed to do.
Much more importantly, the 550 tons of uranium ore in question wasn’t a secret. It was well-known that Iraq had a stored cache of the stuff at its Tuwaitha nuclear complex. Ever since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, the ore had been under the lock and key of the International Atomic Energy Agency. (Ironically, Tuwaitha was looted after the U.S. invasion, when the Bush administration failed to order American armed forces to secure it).
More importantly, uranium yellowcake is about as many steps away from a nuclear weapon as a block of marble is from Michelangelo’s statue David.
Doesn’t matter, dude. Wingnuttia has its story and they’re sticking to it; and so yeah, we are going to have to keep going through it again… and again… and again.
Call it whack-a-mole. Or whack-a-winger.
