Scheer Nonsense

Today we have the latest in a series of assaults on logic, common sense, the profession of journalism and the intelligence of the American newspaper reader. Even without the punny title, you might have guessed that I was talking about Robert Scheer's weekly column.

to anyone not rabid for war, the United Nations inspections would seem to be going well. As regards the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is now arguably the most open society in the world.

After Saddam has spent years deceiving the UN arms inspectors, and all of the recent months dragging his heels to avoid inspections, you'd have to be a credulous fool of the highest rank to believe that Iraq is any kind of "open society". Yet Scheer reflexively jumps to the conclusion that the U.S. is wrong and Iraq is right even before Iraq's 12,000 page report on its weapons programs has been examined.

And let's not forget that Scheer was so quick to applaud Saddam's acceptance of "unconditional inspections" back in September, just as Saddam was placing a huge list of conditions on the unconditional inspections. Scheer has since quietly dropped this claim, but has he issued a retraction or correction? of course not. And will he give any credence to this report which says that "Many of the Iraqi scientists U.N. arms inspectors want to interview have been spirited abroad or switched to innocuous posts and their places taken by unknown technicians, according to Iraqi exiles and Western officials. "? Of course he won't.

What if the United States were subject to such an investigation? Might U.N. inspectors find the source of the anthrax used to terrorize the nation in a nerve-racking but as yet unsolved crime committed a year ago? Our government has said that the deadly anthrax brew was almost certainly not an imported product, so why has its origin eluded the world's most elaborate security force?

So now he's drawing some kind of twisted equivalence between Saddam's weapons programs and last year's anthrax attacks on Americans as if imputing that the US government was somehow responsible for the latter.

How could one blame George W. if he is among the vast majority of Americans who blissfully and conveniently forget that we are the only ones to ever actually use a nuclear weapon...it may explain why even those who love freedom and democracy as much as we do are frightened not only of Saddam Hussein, but increasingly of us.

How fatuous to compare the ending of World War II with Saddam's use of chemical weapons on his own citizens. And to compare Saddam's pathological monocracy against our open society with its accountable and decentralized government and a free press that permits even the demented bloviations and chronically discredible ravings of a Robert Scheer.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at December 12, 2002 07:15 AM