Sunday, May 06, 2007

Meanwhile

Over there:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A car bomb killed at least 35 people and wounded 80 on Sunday next to a crowded market in a Shi'ite district of Baghdad which has been a repeated target of attacks blamed on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda.


Which brings us to another Great Moment in Modern Punditry:

The soft version of this argument is that the delay in finding weapons of mass destruction proves we should have given the U.N. weapons inspectors more time. Hans Blix intimated as much when he archly noted that "it is conspicuous that so far [U.S. troops] have not stumbled upon anything, evidence." The reason U.S. troops haven't yet found anything is that Hussein worked assiduously to hide his proscribed weapons. Iraq moved weapons around the country in tractor-trailers, buried them in out-of-the-way places and so on. The lesson is that finding Hussein's weapons isn't as simple as pulling over to the side of the road and peering into suspicious-looking buildings. It requires cracking open the elaborate secrecy apparatus surrounding them. That's something Blix was never going to be able to do. The difficulty of locating weapons of mass destruction doesn't prove that inspectors should have been given more time. It proves that inspections could never have worked while Hussein remained in power.