F*ck Hemingway, Where's the RDX?

[reprehensor]

Forget Ernest Hemingway, Where's the RDX?

A Review of the Duelfer Report

November 13, 2004

The Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD is commonly called "The Duelfer Report," after its director, Charles Duelfer. This long (966 page) three-volume report is the U.S. Government's final word on whether the government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein was pursuing chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, as well as ballistic missiles of prohibited type and range.

Given the manifest political pressure from their superiors to document evidence of prohibited weapons programs, the report's authors spared no effort or expense. For 16 months, 1,500 U.S. and British inspectors searched Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction. The team was called the Iraq Survey Group. The cost of the search by these 1,500 personnel was $600 million. <1>

As the world now knows in abundant detail, the team found no evidence of the prohibited articles. But what illuminates the policy making process in the United States Government is the elephantine manner in which the report grudgingly comes to that conclusion.

As such, the report attempts to make lemonade out of lemons by providing long-winded "context" for the absence of any actual evidence of prohibited weaponry. The document—which ought to be first and foremost a painstaking inventory of physical evidence of weaponry—takes several lengthy detours into secondary or even irrelevant matters, as will be seen below.

It also displays a symptom of what appears to be a growing tendency of government documents that attempt to rationalize away the stupidity or misfeasance of government officials: the curse of "fine writing." Like its sister effort in alibi-making, the 9/11 Commission Report, <2> the Duelfer opus swathes inconvenient facts in the soft bandages of English Lit. Therefore, the paramount question—did Saddam Hussein develop weaponry banned by United Nations resolutions—recedes before a psychoanalytic portrait of a fiend in human form who obviously intended to get those weapons, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.

The report even hilariously quotes Ernest Hemingway (more an expert on the drinking emporia of Havana than contemporary Middle Eastern developments, surely) in order to illuminate the Beast of Baghdad's singular personality. It is as if in 1945, British Intelligence had dispatched a team of technical experts to defeated Germany for a report on the state of German rocketry and received instead a character study of Hitler. <3>

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[Komrade _azul]

1. Hemingway wrote Old man and the sea or was it...

Old Man and the Bomb?