What
was in it for Saddam's minions, including his sons, if they were to
scrape up the billions of dollars needed to start and maintain a WMD
program? All such a program did, from their perspective, is drain off
funds they needed for other projects, and draw the unwanted attention of
bombers and cruise missiles. In their corrupt minds, a new "love
palace" would always be a priority over a WMD site that was likely to be
turned into dust as soon as it was discovered. If they shortchanged
Saddam on a palace or his Babylon reconstruction there was a strong
chance he might notice. However, it would be easy enough to hide that he
did not have a WMD program.
Saddam was unlikely to be able to tell the difference between
nuclear-grade graphite and pencil lead. What are the chances that the
uneducated dictator could tell a centrifuge from a cow-milking machine?
By claiming that the program was disbursed at hundreds of different
sites, it would ensure that Saddam was never able to visit more then a
handful and therefore would not be able to uncover the fraud.
Think
of this as the Heisenberg Defense, after German physicist Werner
Heisenberg, who claimed after World War II that he tricked Hitler into
thinking his team was working on an atomic bomb while in reality they
were deliberately spinning their wheels. Unfortunately for the
viability of this defense, most people didn't believe Heisenberg.
If this keeps up, we're going to have to run a contest: what's the
most bizarre excuse that war partisans can come up with for the missing
WMD? My money is on Steven Den Beste to come up with the best one.
