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 Ice
Cube 
 "Bush's
lame response to North Korea has made it quite clear that all he
wants is to invade Iraq again. North Korea may be more dangerous
in fact, but there's no oil there, and it simply doesn't figure
in the grand eschatological design of Bush's theocratic circle.
Pyongyang isn't even in the Bible!" "Word
comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support to
our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be laden with
explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed, peace be
upon him. "
 "'When
it comes to learning from its mistakes, corporate America has
fallen off the rehab wagon more times than Robert Downey, Jr.
A quick glance at last week's papers reveals that it's monkey
business as usual on Wall Street."
 "'People
are more aware of the world that they want to live in, and
now they have to realize that they can actually create that
world and fight for the things that are worth fighting for
and not feel apathetic. We are all going to die. There is
no point in holding anything back. ."
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by Ross Levine As the pop song goes, individuals sometimes seek out human affection in the most unlikely places, and so governments on occasion repeat the error in their quest for those fearsome spoils of war known as weapons of mass destruction. Such is the current situation in the nation of Iraq, where our leaders are spending billions to find these formidable treasures, rivals to such sought-after McGuffins as the Maltese Falcon and the Holy Grail. True, when hiding a key to one's home, the tendency is to just throw it under the welcome mat, but a wily despot like Saddam Hussein would never have been that cavalier about concealing his most coveted assets. Hence, it's a given that the weapons are there -- we just need to be more creative about finding them. What follows is my list of 10 of the most likely unlikely places where, once and for all, we may find these elusive chemical, biological and nuclear agents that seem to have so much of the planet in a toxic lather. 1. Climb a tree. Iraq produces 400,000 tons of dates yearly, her second largest cash cow after oil. Dates are labor-intensive, and while workers are up in the palms hand-pollinating the blossoms or plucking extra fruit from the clusters, how much trouble would it be to slip a few anthrax spores into each and every Khadrawy? 2. Calling all cars. Especially Toyota Avalons, the vehicles of choice for Saddam's Sunni minions. Do you have any idea how much arsenic trichloride can be stuffed in a glove compartment? And consider the devastation that could be unleashed by the detonation of a single nuclear airbag.
3. Dive! As every school kid knows, there are two major rivers in Iraq, the Tigris and the Euphrates. And considering how many tons of toxic chemicals we have lying at the bottoms of our own waterways, why couldn't the same be true over there? 4. Walk a mile. For a camel, of course. Camels are veritable storage tanks on legs. What would it take to siphon some water out of a hump or two and refill it with a lethal chemical soup? Just be careful, though, that one of these "dirty" dromedaries doesn't spit in your eye and leave you permanently cameltose. 5. Well, well, well . . Isn't anyone wondering why this time around Saddam didn't torch all the oil wells? Maybe they're not just innocently pumping petroleum. The WMDs could be hidden down in the sediment, with the rigs just serving as elaborate decoys to fool us. We mustn't let our veneration for such crude riches blind us to the dangerous substances that may be lurking in their midst. 6. Guess who's coming to dinar. Hasn't anyone ever told you that money is one of the dirtiest objects known to man? What would it have taken for Uday and Qusay to have sprinkled a few Ebola or smallpox microbes on all the stacks of dollars and euros they borrowed from Iraq's central bank? Has anybody examined those germbacks for traces of a sophisticated bio-weapons program that could dissolve the organs of millions of innocent consumers? Once that money returns to circulation, it could be too late to avert a massive die-off at America's ATM machines. 7. Shock and raw. . .garbage. Why aren't we combing the power and sewage plants? They're certainly not producing electricity and clean water, so what else is left for them to do except make heinous weapons capable of obliterating the civilization we know and love. 8. Saddam's love shack. Have we truly given this infamous condom-minium a complete and thorough going-over? Or do we just assume that because of all the mirrors, blue shag carpeting and fantasy paintings of naked blondes being rescued by moustachioed heroes wrestling crocodiles, that it couldn't possibly be hiding anything more lethal than a videotape of our favorite dick-tator unzipping his fly? Our intelligence forces need to concentrate their efforts here for a while, even if it means getting into the briefs of the most seductive Middle Eastern tyrant since Perverse Musharraf. Who knows, some of that uranium the Iraqi love-daddy bought down in Africa might even show up in the lava lamp he kept right there at bedside on his night table.
9. Watch those trailers! Sure they've now been mostly dismissed as producers of hydrogen for weather balloons as opposed to the bioweapons factories they were originally thought to be, but that's no reason to give up on them. Until proven otherwise, we must never dismiss the threat posed to the free world by these potential Winnebagos of mass destruction. 10. Check Canada! Maybe that's why the Canucks didn't support our going to war. Maybe they made a deal with Saddam to hide his weapons in Butchart Gardens or on Baffin Island. What else would you expect of a nation that legalizes homo honeymoons, offers health insurance and reasonably priced medication to all, and returns one-fifth of its land mass to its native peoples? If they aren't the ones sitting on Saddam's terror repository, I'll eat my turban. Of course, if we're really serious about finding WMDs in Iraq, we can always concentrate on the thousands of unexploded cluster bombs strewn about their cities and villages that pose an ever-present danger to life and limb. Even if we're the ones who put them there, it doesn't mean we can't take credit for finding them. 15 July 03 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is.
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