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Eshin Direct

April 1, 2010 Who cares about the WMD?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a political post but I felt inspired after I watched Matt Damon’s Green Zone. The film tackles the issue of the questionable intelligence surrounding the weapons of mass destruction that drove the US and the UK to invade Iraq.

It’s an action flick and a fictionalizing of the search for WMD. It takes a left turn about a quarter of the way in with the main protagonist, Chief Warrant Officer Miller, essentially goes rogue and operates outside the US Army structure to help the CIA, that veritable institution of truth, to bring stability to Iraq.

It’s a fanciful tale and even with a stretch of the imagination, highly unlikely. Most audiences will know better than to take it as gospel which means our dear American friends probably will.

After all, didn’t most people take the notions of an Iraq being armed with weapons of mass destruction seriously? The film alludes to the mainstream media’s culpability in driving home that notion. Ironically, the film’s main protoganist is called Miller and the journalist considered instrumental in forming the popular opinion was New York Times’ Judith Miller1.

Of course it would have been nice to have other people brought out into the limelight for their complicity in fabricating the most costly hoax of all time – Hans Blix, Colin Powell, and probably the Rupert Murdoch’s entire publishing arm.

Is it a small thing? No, we went to war over it and oddly enough, people are still dying in Iraq for it.

But I recall a conversation I had with a friend of mine way back in 2003, on the question of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. His point, and these days I tend to agree with it, is that regardless of whether or not they find these WMD in Iraq or that we were misled on the road to war, the fact is that the US and the world is embroiled in that country and will be. The solution wasn’t going to be the withdrawal of the US from occupying Iraq as we had long moved past that point, making the WMD issue a moot point.

Would I love to see Blair and Bush on trial for fraud? I sure would but like the trials of so many war criminals in this day and age – Radovan Karadzic, Sloban Milosovic, Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein – who really cares by and large?

  1. In the film, the journalist is called Lawrie Dayne and the publication she works for is the Wall Street Journal, reference incorrectly to URLs on Google that us twsj.com. [↩]

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