February 22, 2006

If You Can't Find It, It Must Not Exist

You can’t prove a negative. Well, except for this one: Saddam Hussein had no WMDs.

This is proven. It’s one of those things that everybody knows, even if the only reason everyone knows it is that the people who most want to believe it keep repeating it the loudest.

The standard of negative proof with respect to Saddam’s WMDs is a new one, to say the least. They didn’t exist because we haven’t found them. You can’t argue with that, right? If you can’t find something, it doesn’t exist. We couldn’t find Eric Rudolph for six years, so he didn’t exist (until he was caught). We couldn’t find the runaway bride for four days. You gonna tell me she got shipped off to Syria? Please. If she existed, Hans Blix would have known where she was.

Things you can’t find don’t exist and have never existed. Everyone knows that. Therefore the entire Iraq war was illegitimate, because the whole reason we went was WMDs! (What? You say Bush gave at least nine other reasons for going? Well, I don’t see them anywhere. They don’t exist and never existed!)

The proof of this particular negative got a little muddled last week when Cybercast News Service released videos of Saddam and his henchmen discussing the non-existent WMDs. The video was accompanied by documents indicating that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, including mustard gas and anthrax. And in the video, he discussed how the weapons might be used.

The CNS report also highlighted evidence that Saddam had actively sought to work with terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, which fits as well in the This Can’t Be category because everyone knows that Saddam had nothing to do with terrorists and especially Al Qaeda.

OK, that’s two negatives proven.

So proven, in fact, that anything casting doubt on said negatives is written off as non-credible – by definition – by a large number of Americans, including many of those steeped in the Washington culture.

Many of these same people criticize President Bush for supposedly “cherry-picking” pieces of intelligence to suit his preconceived view of the situation. So how do these folks react to information like that offered by CNS?

Not credible! Pro-Bush propaganda! It’s already been proven that Saddam had no WMDs!

Once the negative is proven, it’s proven. You don’t unprove a negative. You see that pink elephant standing in the middle of the room? No you don’t! Pink elephants have been proven not to exist, so what you see you do not see.

Proven knowledge was not considered quite so proven just three short years ago, not even by Charles Duelfer, the man who led the UN’s post-invasion search for the weapons. He didn’t find them, but wasn’t egotistical enough to conclude that if he couldn’t find them, they could never have been there.

“ISG was unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war,” Mr. Duelfer said in his report on the matter.

Does that prove that Saddam has WMDs? Of course not. It only leaves room for consideration that every possible avenue for discovering their fate has not been exhausted. Could the weapons have been moved to Syria? Conventional wisdom regards such a notion as preposterous, even though many of the very same people who embrace such conventional wisdom keep telling us how porous the Iraqi/Syrian border is. Even though Syrian President Bashar Assad is one of Saddam’s Baathists-in-arms.

I’m not convinced that Saddam had WMDs (nor do I have a problem justifying the war if he didn’t). But I find it awfully hard to accept without question the notion that so much intelligence was wrong, and that a man who tried so hard to keep weapons inspectors out of his country had nothing at all to hide.

And that makes it hard for me to consider it proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Saddam had no WMDs. So when someone produces information that suggests he did, perhaps that information should be viewed in the context of what it means to our national security interests, rather than the horrifying possibility that it might mean Bush was right about something.

But you can’t look at information that way when the proof of a negative is already an established fact in your mind. See that opening in your mind for the truth? No you don’t! It doesn’t exist and never existed.

This is Column # DC21. Request permission to publish here.