Libyan WMDs and Dubious Republican Claims

I just today stumbled upon some very interesting information regarding Libya's weapons of mass destruction programs, and Libyan leader Qaddafi's post-Iraq-invasion offer to suspend them. This provides a good opportunity to discuss the dubious claims by Republicans that this (and other events) was a direct result of the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq.

One of the most rarely challenged claims of victory by Republicans involves the offer by Libyan leader Qaddafi to suspend his chemical and nuclear weapons programs and allow international weapons inspectors into Libya in 2003. Republicans seized this as an obvious positive consequence of the war in Iraq, claiming that Qaddafi was afraid of the repercussions of maintaining WMD programs similar to the programs the U.S. had claimed that Saddam Hussein had. While I am certainly no expert on Libya or Qaddafi, it still surprised me that it took until today, at least three years after Republicans first started making this claim, for me to come across a solid refutation of the Republican line on this issue.

In fact, Qaddafi had made a commitment to fight against al-Qaeda and offered to open its WMD programs to international inspections two years before 9/11 (information here, under "Reformed Character"). At the time, the Clinton administration was more concerned with the refusal of Qaddafi to extradite two terrorist suspects to Scotland for prosecution, so the offer did not go anywhere. While this could be seen as a failure of the Clinton administration, the important point is that Qaddafi had decided to give up his WMD programs long before Iraq was invaded -- in fact before President Bush even became president. The moves in 1999 by Qaddafi were part of an established policy of moderation aimed at improving Libyan relations with the United States and other countries. Qaddafi's reiteration of his offer in 2003 was most certainly not a result of any fear resulting from the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- it was a calculated diplomatic move to maximize the positive response to his cessation of WMD programs at a time when WMDs had become an important international issue.

This issue is of course rather old, and the reason I found it worthy of blogging was largely because it struck me as so interesting that the truth regarding these claims was so hard to find that it took a compulsive political reader like myself three years to come across the truth. Granted, I had not spent time specifically looking into this claim, nor have I spent much time studying things relating to Libya, but it is still striking. The important point is that, for the average American who does not invest nearly as much time in political issues, the truth regarding this and a number of other issues will probably remain forever hidden. This is a rather minor issue, but it seems to me that this instance is merely one of a huge number of cases in which small misleading or untruthful claims pass below the radar and become accepted as political truths. While a single one of these lies probably has little effect, the cumulative effects of all such distortions are probably extremely large.

This all points to a fundamental flaw in our system of media and information dissemination, in which the 30-second soundbyte rules and "fair and balanced" means letting both Republicans and Democrats make unsupported, false claims without being challenged. This problem is being reconciled by other means of spreading information, such as Wikipedia and other in-depth, unbiased, massive sources of information. The sooner we can cast aside the corporate-and-government-controlled, obsolete, harmful media structures that have dominated for at least a century, the sooner we will be able to expose and eradicate the propaganda and fear-mongering that has come to dominate our national political discourse.