Recent efforts, on the part of Right-wing Commentariat and Blogosphere, have sought to revive the notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which he planned to use in attacks on the US, but which he spirited across the border to Syria, in miraculous and timely fashion, to avoid their detection by invading US forces.
Much has been made of the report that Saddam was caught on tape, bragging about the ease with which such attacks might be carried out.
What interests me, however is the presence of countervailing voices from the Right...
such as appear in the comments
here, and which I take the liberty of quoting at moderate length.
There is now a large segment of the population that thinks the most sensible explanation for all we've observed is that Saddam Hussein, having watched us pull out our inspectors in late `98, decided to fold up and destroy his WMD programs in secret. (Which I am willing to believe, but it does seem odd.)
Whereas the idea that he really did want those weapons in the first place, and would have sought some way to stash them really well (and make us look like fools in the event that we "give the sanctions time to work") is simply outlandish fantasy, clung to by us neocons who just can't admit we were wrong.
What this suggests is that some few over there are applying the principle of Occam's Razor to the various scenarios proposed for the absence of WMD in Iraq.
My own question is this: given our capacities for remote electronic surveillance, including presumably some form of satellite based night-vision (thanks, Buck Rogers, Obi-wan et al.) how realistic is it to suppose that entire weapons programs could have been moved without our knowledge, from under our very (so to speak) noses? I'll take my answer off the air.