Wayback Wednesday—WMDs in Iraq

It feels like 2002 again, when the US was heavily propagandizing that Iraq was actively creating chemical and biological weapons, and also actively seeking to create an atomic bomb. There were mobile factories, and imminent threats, despite the fact that the country had been through two major wars (against Iran and then the US-backed coalition created by Bush 41), an armed rebellion, and a decade of sanctions. There was obviously insufficient industrial base from which Saddam Hussein and Iraq could do such things, but if you repeat a falsehood enough, some people will believe it and many people will at least consider it. Show a few aluminum tubes and many people will be convinced that a country is building WMDs and even some of those suspicious of the story will come around to saying that if WMDs are found, then of course the US must invade. Thus we had a whole lot of dupes supporting a superstructure of fools.

Anyway, it was all bullshit lies, and frankly fairly obvious ones. There were many reports of WMDs being found, thanks mainly to very sensitive field equipment offering false positives. This is how field equipment should work, by the way: much better to be safe than sorry. Subsequent testing generally showed the detected WMD caches, factories etc. were nothing of the sort, but follow-up news stories never quite got the attention of the initial reports. I'll never forget a thread on the off-topic/politics section of old Horror Writers Association board, in which not only did someone wish that the next anti-war protest I attended would itself be attacked by WMD-sporting terrorists (sort of a dumb tactic on their part) but who responded one time just with:

HA!

which led to a link to one of the stories that WMDs had been detected, which a week later turned out to be another false positive.

Of course, old WMDs were found—this is old news. From 2004, A roadside bomb thought to contain deadly sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. It was believed to be the first confirmed discovery of any of the banned weapons that the United States cited in making its case for the Iraq war. It wasn't even clear whether the creators of this IED knew what the shell they had repurposed and rigged to a roadside bomb even was.

It's not unusual to this day to hear people say that of course Iraq had been producing tons of WMDs but they just...went to Syria, were really well-hidden that that that [descent into weird conspiracy theories].

A decade later, The New York Times has a lengthy report on the soldiers who encountered similar 1980s-early 1990s era WMDs, almost none of which were of local manufacture. Sources in the article suggest that the US kept this quiet because the revelations would have been embarrassing.

Honestly, the US needn't have worried. The convinced are rarely moved by mere evidence. This isn't a political issue, mind you. The folks at The American Conservative understood the Times article well enough. Meanwhile, on Facebook, let us hear from the equally right-wing "Joe the Plumber" (link here, screencap below, because FB links seem to go wonky sometimes)



Luckily, many of the comments on Joe the Plumber's Facebook suggest that Joe actually read the article, but there are also as many crowing about the revelation, or going on about commies and socialists, etc. Not everyone needs to be a fool, you just need enough fools to create a population of reasonable-sounding dupes.

One thing I always look for these days online is this: is the blogger, or tweeter, or whatever-er actually reading that which forms the basis of his or her comment? It's a challenge, since many people will link to a tumblr that links to a blog that summarized a news site that posted an article that collected some links and appropriated tweets for their quotes instead of actually asking anyone anything. Not only does the game of telephone ruin things, not only does Reinforcement Theory compel people to pick and choose what actually goes from their eye holes into the brains, but often what's actually being reported barely exists. Another favorite of mine is from a few years later, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a story about the Astrodome, in the seventeenth paragraph, we're told that, back at the Superdome in New Orleans One ambulance official [that is, a person working for a private ambulance company—NK] overseeing the airlift rescue operations said a gunshot was fired at a military helicopter over the Superdome before daybreak was picked up by the wires, and by the time The Navy Times got to the story, a headline: Military helicopters dodge bullets over Superdome. PS: story was bullshit.

So when I look online these days, I not only always remind myself to read closely* but to see whether or not the commenters/posters/bloggers/journalists are themselves reading closely. Most often, they're not.



*Of course, it is possible to read too closely, especially when dealing with amateur or hobbyist publications, where language is often used loosely. I remember years ago, a weird debate that emerged over the headline "Shawn Michaels Resigns"—there was literally confusion over whether he resigned (quit) or re-signed (renewed his contract). One hopes that better sources—actual newspaper articles, not newspaper blogs, newspaper blogs over hobbyist blog, hobbyist blogs over quickly composed tweets, etc.