Sarin,Schmarin

The report that a roadside bomb attack may have used a shell that contained sarin nerve agent has the right wing media all atwitter. Aha! WMDs!

Not yet.

While there’s something to the notion that where there’s one mouse there are a dozen more living in your wall, the possible presence of sarin in one cannister hardly justifies invading Iraq at a cost of more than $150 billion, 30,000 dead Iraqis (the number comes from the Bush Administration, courtesy of Bob Woodward’s “Plan of Attack”) and 1,200 dead coalition troops.

More to the point: Even if we were to discover enormous warehouses full of nuclear weapons, the war still wouldn’t have been justified. The point being, the US claimed that it KNEW that Iraq had WMDs when it clearly did not. Guessing correctly doesn’t count, not that that’s what happened here.