The Sarin Wrap

Hoo boy, I can just picture the conversation in the Bush bedroom this morning:

"Mr. President? Mr. President? Bushie?"

"Hrmm? Whazzat?"

"It's me, Mr. President, Karl. It's Karl."

"Oh, hey K-man. Mornin'. Aww crap . . . is it raining outside?"

"No, Mr. President, they're just washing the windows."

"Well, that's damn fine. You tell those boys they do a damn fine job on those windows. I damn near walked right through that French door last week it was so clean."

"Yes, Mr. President . . . but actually, I have very good news. I came to tell you: They found it."

"Don't fuck with a man who just woke up, Karl, don't fuck with him. Are you fucking with me?"

"No, sir. The tests came back positive this morning. It was sarin, no doubt about it."

"HOOOOO yah! We got that bearded sumbitch now! HOOOOO YAH! Get Tony on the phone and tell him his job's safe: We got them motherfuckin' Dubya Em Dees!"

Yes, it looks like ol' Dubya was right after all: Saddam did have banned chemical weapons. Of course I should have known this all along. Lots of people doubted the President when he made the rather silly claim that Iraq was awash in banned weapons, since if they existed they must have been better concealed than Bush's own National Guard records. But we should have known better, we should have trusted. After all, this is a man who has a track record of being able to personally sniff out illegal chemicals anywhere in his vicinity (and then ingest them). When a man has that much experience, you ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.

In any case, I'm sure that by tomorrow we'll see a Bush photo-op featuring the President in front of thousands of cheering, smiling troops, backed by an enormous banner the size of Honduras proclaiming, "WMDs Found!" Most mindless newswatchers will probably assume from all the hype that some secret underground cavern, chock full of enough nuclear warheads and anthrax and ricin and sarin and aerosol cheese to destroy the world five times over, was found by tenacious GIs who never gave up the hunt, even in the face of diminishing odds.

Not entirely the case, I'm afraid. What was "found"? One lousy, measly rocket shell, vintage 1980s, probably dating from the Iran-Iraq war, and probably manufactured by Iraq's erstwhile ally, the good ol' U. S. of A., filled with two chemicals that, when detonated, combine to form the deadly sarin nerve agent.

That is to say, they would combine to form sarin--were it not for the fact that said chemicals were further past their expiration date than Apu's Quickie Mart hot dogs. It would be hard to criticize Iraq for not destroying something that was already so old it was no longer a threat, and indeed this particular shell most probably came from a cache of nerve-agent-filled ordinance already identified by the U.N. and marked for destruction in the early 1990s.

And how did our tenacious troops "find" this devastatingly dangerous Weapon (singular) of Mass Destruction? It was tossed at them, of course. The poor fuckers who found it and decided to try to use it to blow up a passing U.S. convoy most likely had no idea that it potentially contained sarin, an assumption that is bolstered by the fact that they also had neither the knowledge nor the equipment to fire the shell, instead making it into a makeshift bomb by wrapping it in Primacord and lighting it.

I'm sure the White House spin on this one will be something to the effect that if there's one, then there must be millions more. I'm sure that thought will re-engergize flagging support for the war in some circles, and certainly breathe new life into the all-but-abandoned search for WMDs. For my part, I would sleep a lot better at night if the President would take every soldier, inspector, and Army Ranger at his disposal and instead order them to secure the dozens of Iraqi nuclear facilities currently left unguarded as a consequence of our brilliantly executed security plan in Iraq.

In today's busy world, a person only has time to worry about so much. And given the choice between worrying about WMDs that might not be there, and nuclear materials that clearly are there--and being stolen by God knows whom--I think I'll choose the known threat over the theoretical one. What I just can't fathom is why the President isn't out telling anyone who'll listen about this frightening nuclear threat. Of course, it's probably because that nuclear threat is of his own making.

Or maybe it's just because he can't pronounce it.