Confirming evidence that our government is now taking its rhetorical plays directly from the pages of “1984” comes with this CNN report from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s press conference yesterday:
The failure of U.N. arms inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction “could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s noncooperation” with U.N. disarmament resolutions, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday….
The chief U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the U.N. Security Council last week that his teams had found no “smoking gun” in nearly two months of inspections but urged more “active cooperation” from Iraq. “The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq’s WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq’s noncooperation,” Rumsfeld said. |
Commentary seems almost superfluous. Iraqis! If we find evidence of your WMD program, we will invade you! If we do not find evidence, that is evidence that you have not cooperated — so we will invade you!
What’s really going on here, I suppose, is that Rumsfeld never wanted inspections to resume in the first place, always wanted to invade first and ask questions later, and is now trying to exploit the situation by closing a Catch-22 pincer upon the Iraqi dictator. Unfortunately for him, Rumsfeld’s contortions wind up painting himself as a purveyor of paradoxical doublethink more worthy of “Dr. Strangelove” than the real world of geopolitics.
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