David Kay: "looking for a smoking gun is a fool's mission."

(This is an article published in the Washington Post last January by David Kay. Reading what Kay said then about the UN weapons inspectors is knee-slapping stuff now.)

January 19, 2003

"It Was Never About A Smoking Gun"

By David Kay

(David Kay is a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. In 1991, he served as chief nuclear weapons inspector of UNSCOM, the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq.)

When it comes to the U.N. weapons inspection in Iraq, looking for a smoking gun is a fool's mission. That was true 11 years ago when I led the inspections there. It is no less true today -- even after the seemingly important discovery on Thursday of a dozen empty short-range missile warheads left over from the 1980s.

The only job the inspectors can expect to accomplish is confirming whether Iraq has voluntarily disarmed. That is not a task that need take months more. And last week's cache is irrelevant in answering that question, regardless of the U.N.'s final determination. That's because the answer is already clear: Iraqi is in breach of U.N. demands that it dismantle its weapons of mass destruction.

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Commentary on this article available on The Mahablog.

Kay pronounced on cable tv as the resident "terrorism" expert in late April or early May, right after three key people in the Saddam defense establishment were captured, that we'd "know within 72 hours where the weapons of mass destruction were or there aren't any."

Must be, as it's a plain fact that he's an idiot.

Compare/contrast current Republican spin that Joseph Wilson wasn't "qualified" to go to Niger (even though he'd spent many years there) to look for the Uranium-Iraq connection, and that he was chosen only because he was against Bush.

...it must have been fired.

I've never accepted the notion that finding WMD in Iraq would amount to finding a "smoking gun". It's a gun, period.

We know he had this gun during the first Gulf war, and that he didn't fire it. He was accused of possessing this gun in the 12 years since, yet he didn't fire it or give it to someone else to fire.

We sold him the gun and we encouraged its use against Iranians in the 80's. When he used it against his own people in 1988 we did nothing.

The only real gunsmoke here came from our "shock and awe" invasion, and the lies that made it possible.