‘God is my weapons inspector’

February 27, 2006

Nearly three years after the beginning of the war in Iraq, most reasonable people seem to have come to an agreement about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: there aren’t any. Some of us may still feel a little bothered by the fact that the war was launched under false pretenses, while others are willing to overlook previous concerns, but the question has been settled — Bush said the war was necessary because of weapons that didn’t exist.

This isn’t exactly breaking news. And yet, some of the president’s allies are still out there, arguing creatively that the WMD are real and may still be found. Last week, it was Fox News military analyst Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force Lt. Gen., who insisted that Russian Special Forces entered Iraq before the invasion and moved the WMD to Syria.

Oddly enough, as The New Republic reported, around the same time, another White House ally had an even more imaginative idea about the missing weapons.

Bill Tierney, who served as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the late ’90s, told National Review Online this week that he would look to God to direct him to possible WMD sites. “God is my intel,” Tierney told NRO. His belief in the existence of a uranium-enrichment plant near Tarmiyah was supported, he said, by the fact that a friend had seen it in a dream.

Indeed, Tierney is quite the theorist. He also said that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 2001 anthrax attacks. In time, Tierney believes, all of his ideas will be vindicated.

National Review’s Byron York said, “[T]he people in charge of searching for WMD didn’t take Tierney seriously.” I can’t imagine why not.

Faith based programs. Love them. What I cannot figure out, though is how a true moron like this is even allowed to speak in public. Sometimes, though, it may be a good thing, as some people may get to see the true idiocy of the right.

  • Your’e kidding, right? This is ridiculous. I mean, how can a person say such silliness and not have an interviewer burst into laughter right in their face???

  • I remember FOXNews was discovering WMD every day in the first weeks of the war – Even they gave up. The moving WMD theory is completely hair-brained, unless our military is being led by people who are dumber than rocks. You have to assume that we had satellite recon focused on Iraq for years. You’d also have to assume we significantly increased that capacity in the months leading up to the war. The sizes of the cited stockpiles could not have been moved without notice.
    The short of it is this: You can’t make the argument that WMD were secretly moved without insulting the intelligence of virtually every command officer in the Pentagon.

  • there are also the propaganda robots who insist that the recent “tapes” of saddam prove there were wmds.

    i’m reminded that when nixon finally resigned, he still had the support of somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the public.

  • Not that I, as a non-believer, take any of this seriously, but I marvel at the fact that those who do can imagine the Creator of the Universe bothering to serve as intel for this ungodly regime.

    Look at the fate of all those other regimes in history who claimed Him, the last being the Nazi regime, with “Gott mit uns” on their soldiers’ belt buckles (you can still pick those up pretty cheap on eBay).

  • Has anyone wondered why we didn’t just plant some WMD’s in Iraq at some point and say “look, we found them!!” I’m not advocating that, but it seems like something we had the power to do, and it would have saved us some face in the eyes of the world. So why didn’t we take the easy way out?

  • addison, we could do it, but, the truth would out on it eventually, and THAT would be a scandal worthy of impeachment. They wont risk it.

  • Thanks for finding this. I read it when it came out and then forgot where it was.

    Maybe if I prayed more ….
    .

  • Good point, Addison, and I often wondered about
    that. I concluded that the administration thought
    that they would find remnants of his old program,
    and that they’d spin the hell out of that. I think they
    were genuinely astonished that absolutely nothing
    turned up. Saddam truly disarmed.

    I, too, thought they’d find something. I never thought
    he was a threat to anyone, after being exposed in
    Gulf War I, and after a dozen years of sanctions and
    containment, but I thought they’d uncover bits and
    pieces of his original program.

  • Has anyone bothered to point out to Mr. Tierney that his “god” deceived him? He may wish to review who it is that he is providing worship to.

  • What is it with thos names that end in “erney”?

    Gads what’s next – water witching and divining rods?!?

  • “i’m reminded that when nixon finally resigned, he still had the support of somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the public.”

    in russia today stalin has the same favorable rating as bush, somewhere around 35-38%.

  • The Israelis, you know, the ones who invented God, said that there were three locations in the Bekaa valley where the Syrians buried some of the WMD. The coordinates were handed to us. What happened to that?

  • If a God is running our intel, I think it must be the one of the Aztec variety.
    Huitzilopochtli- god of war who flayed corpses for food
    Xipetotec- the corn god and lord of perpetual torture

    Aztecs required perpetual war, not for conquest alone, but to sieze victims for sacrifice.

    Is our intel not also being shaped to justify a political need for perpetual war at the sacrifice of the third world?

  • I’m a non-believer, too, but this story made me cry out like a devout evangelical: Sweet Jesus Christ!!!
    . . . jim strain in san diego.

  • “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat.”

    taken from “The Man in the Arena” speech by Teddy Roosevelt, 1910

    Bill Tierney is the Man in the Arena. He is a REAL man!

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