Repeat after me: There are No WMDs in Iraq

Apparently, there are no WMDs in Iraq (surpise), which has loosed a torrent of spin this week from the Bush administration. And while the spin isn't exactly news, in the midst of it all, I noticed that yet again, the Bush administration got a pass from the media for its fractured logic and outright unwillingness to admit the obvious.

As you may know, on Saturday, the New York Times and others reported that David Kay, the resigning head of the US search for WMDs in Iraq, said that Iraq likely did not have, and had not had for a long time, any WMDs. In other words, sanctions and inspections were actually working. This obviously makes you wonder how we got it so wrong.

In response, the Bush administration went into full spin mode -- to name but two examples, Vice President Cheney said that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were "conclusive evidence" of a WMD program and Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said that the White House believes that WMDs will be found eventually.

On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Powell now concedes that intelligence may have been wrong, and that Iraq indeed may not have had WMDs after all. [link] But then, the Post uncritically quoted Powell as follows:

Powell said in defense of the decision to go to war that the Bush administration was not simply troubled by the conviction that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons and development programs, but also that Hussein had refused to answer U.N. questions about his government's activities on the subject.

"We were not only saying we thought they had them," Powell said, "but we had questions that needed to be answered. What was it: 500 tons, 100 tons or zero tons? Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing? What we demanded of Iraq was that they account for all of this and they prove the negative of our hypothesis." (emphasis added)

Powell's statment clearly begs the question: just how would Saddam go about "proving the negative of our hypothesis"? Obviously, Iraq's statement to the UN in December 2002, saying that the country didn't have WMDS, wasn't enough, since Iraq was widely suspected of hiding the weapons program, and therefore couldn't be trusted to tell the truth.

But how about if, after the war, when none of Saddam's thugs can get in the way, when no one can stop inspectors from going wherever they want, whenever they want, no WMDs are found? Wouldn't that tend to prove the "negative of our hypothesis"? Apparently not, as Vice President Cheney's and Mr. McClellan's statements make clear.

So what if, after the fall of Iraq, senior officials of the Saddam government who had been captured or turned themselves in told the Americans that there were no WMDs? Would that prove the "negative of our hypothesis"? Alas, apparently that's not enough for the Bush administration, either.

For one example of this (and there are many, I'm sure), I turn to the Department of Defense itself. As it happened, in early April 2003, Saddam's "scientific advisor" turned himself in, but maintained that Iraq had not had WMDs. Shortly thereafter, Secretary Rumsfeld appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" and told host Tim Russert that he didn't believe the Iraqi advisor. Not resting on NBC's promotional department to get the word out, however, the DoD put out a press release. [link]

That release stated, and I'm quoting here,

Rumsfeld said he is convinced the Iraqi regime has squirreled its weapons of mass destruction around the country. He said the United States has evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological activities as well as the restart of its nuclear program.

"Iraqis have learned to live in an inspection environment -- they hid things, they've done it well, they have things underground and well dispersed," Rumsfeld observed.

He said the coalition will need help from Iraqis if it is to find all of Iraq's hidden secrets. "We won't find anything until we find people who tell us where the things are," he said.

In other words, there is nothing that can prove the "negative of our hypothesis" -- if there were WMDs, obviously that would prove the hypothesis. On the other hand, if there are no WMDs, that doesn't prove the negative because "we won't find anything until we find people who tell us where the things are". And if people affirmatively tell us that they don't exist, that's also no proof, since "Iraqis have learned to live in an inspections environment" (meaning, presumably, that they obfuscate and lie as a matter of course).

In effect, what the Bush administration is saying is that our "hypothesis" isn't a "hypothesis" at all, but a conclusion -- hypotheses, remember, are merely the questions that experimentation and investigation are supposed to answer, and may be proven or disproven by the data collected. Here, all of the data in the world won't disprove the "hypothesis".

And if that's the case, where are all of the media pundits saying that the Bush administration is mendacious?