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Monday, May 17, 2004

Sarin used in attack in Iraq, or Terrorists have WMDs!

To the surprise of no one but the liberals, there's been another attempt to use chemical weapons against the US and its allies. (The first attempt was the foiled plot in Jordan.)

Once again, where's the panic? I realize that the liberals are in full denial mode, and either conservatives are just calmer, or that's just wishful thinking and they're too busy gloating. Still, while I'm not usually given to panic and there's still the possibility that this will be a false alarm, someone needs to sound the alarm, false or not:

Terrorists have WMDs.

We went to Iraq hoping to prevent it. We're hoping against hope we can contain North Korea and curb Iran and intimidate Syria all to keep this from happening. It's too late, though:

Terrorists have WMDs.

We knew it might have already happened. We knew they were working on it, but we were hoping they wouldn't be able to develop them, that their plans to acquire them would fail. We hoped and prayed they didn't have them. But they do:

Terrorists have WMDs.

Liberals, go ahead and spin it as a terrible failure of the Bush doctrine. Conservatives, point out that Bush was right all along and that we have to be even more aggressive. Just don't bury it or minimize it or say that there's nothing we can do. Like it or not, the nightmare scenario has happened. The world hasn't ended, and I'm not ready to go buy a gas mask, but can we please drop the arguments over whether we should have gone to war in the first place? While the way we question prisoners is still a legitimate question, let's not pretend that we don't desperately need the information they have. Debate how ethical it is to apply extreme interrogation techniques, but at least acknowledge that we're trying to save thousands of lives by doing so. The mistreatment of Ba'athist prisoners, the horrible murders of civilian contractors, none of these matter as much as one thing:

Terrorists have WMDs.

Update: Stupid quotation marks! The links were broken, but they're fixed now.

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