1, 2, 3, it’s ABC, not WMD

Starting with Kevin Drum at Political Animal, I’m trying to get progressive bloggers and other influence peddlers to stop using the BushCo “weapons of mass destruction,” and go back to the older, more psychologically neutral, “atomic, biological and chemical weapons.”

In adddition to the propaganda value BushCo has infused into its phrase, it's somewhat inaccurate, because not all ABC weapons are equally destructive.

So, let's stop lumping all ABC weapons together under the BushCo rubric of WMDs.

Chemical weapons are much less dangerous, relatively, than AB weapons. And, other than sterilizing land or crops, they don't have the long-term effects that AB weapons do. And they certainly don't have the "multiplier effect" that B weapons do as part of the biological long-term effect. The flip side is that they are the easiest and cheapest to produce.

Biological weapons can be much more dangerous than chemical ones. Or they cannot. Remember the anthrax panic? What, half a dozen people died? That many people die in DC every weekend in car accidents.

Serious biological weapons, like smallpox, take serious bucks and technology to produce. They take more serious bucks and technology to store in a manner that both keeps the home populace thoroughly safe and preserves their potency.

Iraq, after the Gulf War, didn't have the reliable electric power to drive the technology for this in a major way. The money that Saddam was diverting from oil-for-food had four much higher priorities, anyway:
1. Line Hussein family pockets;
2. Bribe or assist UN or other international officials as needed;
3. Spend on conventional weapons;
4. Spend on any chemical weapons.

And then, it takes more money yet, and technology, to seriously weaponize many biological agents. It should be noted that the Soviet Union was apparently the only country to create a smallpox-carrying MIRV, for example.

Atomic weapons are the biggie; psychological terror of a "dirty" conventional bomb aside on one hand, and the skullduggery of Pakistan's A.Q. Khan on the other, this still is work that requires major financial and technological water-carrying. Again, something that Hussein didn't have the bucks or the focus to do.

And, many clear-thinking, analytical, skeptical progressives knew that by or before the summer of 2002, even if we didn't have access to intelligence data.