Some CPA documents came into my hands yesterday.
And here’s something an enterprising presidential candidate could grab hold of and use for good politics and for doing good for the country. Frankly, as the author of the document says, the president could do himself some good if his people would give the issue some attention.
We all know there were no WMD in Iraq. We thought there were. But there weren’t. Some GOP dead-enders still want to pretend that it’s still an open question. But it’s not.
And yet we know there were active WMD programs at one time.
That’s not relevant to the debate about why we went to war, or whether intelligence was manipulated. But it is relevant for another reason: those scientists who did the work are still there. And the knowledge for how to make all sorts of nasty stuff is still in their heads.
It would sort of be a bummer if they ended up putting that knowledge to work for al Qaida or the Syrians or anyone else for that matter.
Now, the people at the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) have thought of this. But the programs aimed at putting these guys to work, according to the documents I’m looking at, are woefully underfunded and getting held up by the same old interagency mumbo-jumbo. And of course all the while we’re sinking lots of money into the on-going search for WMD that pretty clearly is never going to be found.
A good use of our resources? Doesn’t sound like it.
The author of the document argues that the administration should give up the hopeless effort to convince people there might actually have been WMD in Iraq at the time of the invasion and focus its public arguments on its efforts to keep these scientists out of mischief.
Unfortunately, he concedes, those programs haven’t been given enough money and are tied up in bureaucratic infighting.
