One thing that I’ve wanted to point out since the early days of the Iraq war (and that I should have made clear in my satellite photo post) is that Bush some supporters have gone through incredible amounts of rhetorical contortion in order to avoid admitting they were mistaken about Iraqi weapon sites. When it was obvious to everyone that there weren’t any WMD’s, the muttering from the right was about weapons being sneaked out into Syria. With the news of missing explosives, the word is that it was done before the invasion. With the reliance on satellite imagery for Colin Powell’s U.N. presentation, the Administration made clear that they can monitor suspect sites from space, yet war supporters still think letting weapons slip out of Iraq is perfectly reasonable as long as it happened before the troops were there.

Despite the fact that I staunchly opposed the war and that every shred of information points me toward the opposite conclusion, I still think there’s a small chance that Iraq did/does have weapons of mass destruction. If there were weapons and the conservative arguments hold any water, the possibility that the WMD’s that the Bush Administration was trying to protect us from slipped away because they weren’t watching those sites closely enough should be enough to keep Bush and his whole team out of public service for the rest of their lives. Launching a war with a flawed premise is bad enough, but if you launch a war whose premise is solid, but completely fail to accomplish its central objective, then you have no business being commander in chief.

And this is a little off topic, but this story really needs more attention. The thought that powerful explosives were taken by a bunch of thugs is pretty scary, but nuclear sites being dismantled for a year by experts and shipped off to god knows where is fucking terrifying. If we’d had a more competent Administration, you’d think they would have pointed their satellites at one of the dozens of sites and asked “Why does that weapons facility look like a construction site now? Maybe we should send some people over there and check it out.”