“Why are we even bothering to keep looking for those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? At this point, what difference does it make whether we find them or not? Trying to find them serves two ostensible purposes: One is to prevent them from being used, and the other is to settle the argument about whether they exist. But neither purpose really applies any longer.” — Michael Kinsley, Slate

Kinsley argues that the people who would care that we were lied to about the justification for the war are already convinced. The bulk of the American public do not need proff, giving Bush a pass on this one. Even the administration has been retreating from the pretext, now saying the war was justified on purely humanitarian grounds.

I do differ from Kinsley on his other point, which is the irrelevancy of stopping any existing weapons from being used. He argues that without Saddam Iraq is not the rogue state we have to fear most, and there are other dangerous states out there more prone to use WMD against the civilized world. Now, I don’t believe the weapons were ever there, but if they were this argument would not hold water. Given the chaos that reigns in Iraq under US occupation, finding any WMD would matter not so much because there are government elements that represent a threat as because of the risk of diversion to unscrupulous — or even merely ignorant — elements. How can this risk be ignored given the (underreported) story last week from the Iraqi nuclear power facility at xxxx that radioactive uranium unguarded by occupying forces was dumped out onto the ground so the looters could use the barrels for food storage?

Kinsley’s essay veers off in a different direction, however, after considering these points. He wonders, as has been one of my recent preoccupations, why Americans are so ready to believe in WMD. I do agree that the phrase itself has become an incantation (‘”Weapons of mass destruction” are to George W. Bush what fairies were to Peter Pan. He wants us to say, “We DO believe in weapons of mass destruction. We DO believe. We DO.” ‘). Because he believes the debate is irrelevant, he is amazed how rarely people say they don’t know whether Iraq had WMD, the only correct answer. He seems to fault the confident naysayers like myself along with the credulous swallowers of every Bush lie, before wandering off into some unintelligible meditation on how many martinis it takes a pundit to form an opinion and how certain one has to be to believe anything. I suppose his point is to criticize pundit culture, but is he talking about the standards we ought to apply to political commentators or to the rest of us? It is a different but no less opinionated conceit, in a sense, to be the pundit of radical skepticism; I’m not sure the resurrection of the Know-Nothing Party is the answer for the crisis in political polarization in the U.S. today.