Tuesday, May 25, 2004

It is a puzzlement

Collin Levey in the NY Post:
WE felt a little like we'd fallen down a rabbit hole last week on hearing that an artillery shell that tested positive for sarin had been discovered in a roadside bomb in Baghdad. It wasn't the nasty stuff itself that was curious - as Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld intimated, some stray chemical munitions could signify any number of things, or not much at all. The extraordinary part was the tizzy the media and various noteworthies were in to discount it .

Just a few hours after the news broke, former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix grabbed a microphone somewhere to huff that the discovery meant nothing. Others briskly offered that the shell was more likely the bounty of a scavenger hunt by yahoos who didn't even know what they had.

Fair enough. But even forgetting the potency of one drop of liquid sarin, when did the prospect of the accidental use of loose WMDs become reassuring?
Hey, Collin - you have to go with the talking points, no matter how ludicrous they seem.