W-M-Denial?

Craig Karpel sends along this article from the The Spectator of London which sort of tops off the alt-media take on the WMD issue: Namely that the residual evidence is strong for a meaningful WMD cache having been located in Iraq, and that it got off to Syria:

You may be tempted to dismiss this as yet another dodgy claim from a warmongering lackey of the world Zionist neocon conspiracy giving credence to yet another crank pushing US propaganda. If so, perhaps you might pause before throwing this article at the cat. Mr Gaubatz is not some marginal figure. He’s pretty well as near to the horse’s mouth as you can get.Having served for 12 years as an agent in the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, Mr Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was hand-picked for postings in 2003, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Nasariyah in Iraq. His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against US forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies.

Between March and July 2003, he says, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq — two within Nasariyah, one 20 miles south and one near Basra — which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles. He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.

I have always been partial to the Syria theory. For all the cynical talk about that the “runup to war,” the process was in fact absurdly shlepped out, as anyone who was reading the agonized writings of Andrew Sullivan at the time will recall. The main thing that those of us who favored military action at the time were thinking was that given this amount of time, if there’s anywhere Saddam can stash this stuff, he’s certainly been given ample opportunity to do so.

And why was Syria never confronted with the circumstantial evidence that it connived with Iraq on WMD’s? This was before, after all, Nancy Pelosi had named herself ambassador plenipotentiary to Syria. But it is likely that “realist” Colin Powell and the related Bakeroids of State, not irrationally, warned against broadening any aspect of the conflict, including the diplomatic one. The evidence against Syria was not hard; and while many have gone to the gallows on less circumstantial evidence — motive, opportunity, all that stuff — the White House, it seems, did not have the guts, even during that high-water moment of support for its actions (I mean, they had Andrew on their side!), to press the moment.

And now?

The Republicans won’t touch this because it would reveal the incompetence of the Bush administration in failing to neutralise the danger of Iraqi WMD. The Democrats won’t touch it because it would show President Bush was right to invade Iraq in the first place. It is an axis of embarrassment.

Maybe. If the proof were that good, frankly, I believe the Republicans would have jumped on it, embarrassment or not; it would have been far preferable to their current state of humiliation — in the sense of the present political crisis — over the way the war has gone. For this reason, I have to believe something very big is missing from this story, and would certainly be interested in knowing if there has been any objective debunking or not.

UPDATE: Hmm. Actually, what’s the difference? Facts, shmacts!