It's a rare time when linguistics and politics intersect on this blog, but now's the time. Ari Fleischer seems to have rewritten the rules of logical argumentation.
I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find. I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.
[Ari Fleicher, 07/09/03 press briefing]
Jim over on Everything Burns thinks it depends on what "is" means. I think it has more to do with what the antecedent for "they" is. The WMD-doubters? The WMD? Something else? Fleischer goes on to qualify:
We know he had them in the '90s, he used them. So just because they haven't yet been found doesn't mean they didn't exist. The burden is on the critics to explain where the weapons of mass destruction are. If they think they were destroyed, the burden is on them to explain when he destroyed them and where he destroyed them.
No, we didn't know he had them in the '90s, and therein lies the Bush regime's burden of proof.
[Addendum 07/12/03: Ian over at Desiderata has his take on Humpty Dumpty Fleischer semantics]
Posted by jim at July 12, 2003 10:40 AM | TrackBackAs Scott Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, has pointed out, they had accounted for (and destroyed) 90-95% of all WMDs when the UN inspectors were pulled out of Iraq in 1998. They were substantively disarmed. They could not have reconstituted their nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons program using the unaccounted for stock. Hans Blix and the other inspectors could not definitely tell whether in the intervening years Iraq had reconstituted their programs before the US invaded, but it didn't look likely.
Posted by: Ian Evans on July 12, 2003 12:06 PM