One of the enduring mysteries of the Iraq debacle is why the US did not plant evidence of WMDs in Iraq after the invasion. The concept of the "throw-down" is so well established in the thinking of criminal defense attorneys in the US that one can only puzzle: "Why no throw-down, especially since the Bush people knew full well that they had no good evidence of WMDs?" A throw-down is defined as follows, in The Double-Tongued Dictionary:
throw down n. evidence, especially a weapon, planted by police on a suspect or at a crime scene.
At some point, the utter absence of WMD evidence is bound to surface in arguments for the bona fides of the Bush-Blair axis of evildoerbusters. Something like this:
P1. If Bush doubted there was good evidence of WMDs in Iraq, he would have planted a throw-down.
P2. There was no evidence of WMDs found in Iraq, not even a throw-down, despite every opportunity (even now!) to throw evidence down.
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C. Bush did not doubt that there was good evidence of WMDs in Iraq.
The soft spot is P1. My thought is that P1 is false. Every bit of the pre-war hokum had been exposed (the aluminum tubes, the mobile chemical weapons labs etc.--Powell's whole UN "dog and pony" show). Bush's imagination was lively enough (e.g., paint "UN" over "USAF" on warplanes), but cooler heads (Rove's and Cheney's) realized that another exposure would be disastrous. Moreover, I suspect that Cheney and Rumsfeld and their spear-carriers believed that a throw-down would be unnecessary--not because there would be WMDs, but because it wouldn't matter in the end what Sadaam had. "Remember the Maine," and all that. And maybe, in a way, they were right--we shall see. "Let history judge."
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