Friend or Foe?

Desipte appearing in the Arab News, this is a story that rings true:

France’s attempts at creating a coalition of Iraqis opposed to the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi collapsed yesterday as Paris announced it had abandoned its opposition to an international conference to be held on the future of the newly-liberated country.

Come to think of it, the Arab News probably is a lot more reliable than the October-surprise-fake-munitions-story NY Times. According to Clifford May,

What happened to those weapons? General DeLong recalls: “Two days before March 19, 2003, we saw quite a number of vehicles going into Syria. We could not go after them because we said we'd give Saddam 48 hours. A lot of (Iraqi) leaders went into Syria, and a lot of WMD went into Syria. We've gotten indications some went into Lebanon, and probably some went into Iran. …We've done calculations that you could probably bury 16 Eiffel Towers or Empire State Buildings and never find them in the desert.”

(via Instapundit)

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Don't miss Jonah Goldberg's analysis of the NY Times' attempted "late hit":

In the missing-explosives story, you have to wade through a sea of words to learn that the explosives the Bush administration allegedly lost might have been missing before American troops even reached the site. Later in the day, NBC News supported that possibility. Replace "high explosives" with "priceless art" and "weapons depot" with "Baghdad Museum" and you get a feel for the games they're playing.

If you don't understand what I'm getting at, recall that the Times and the rest of the press insisted that the Baghdad Museum was ransacked under the unwatchful eye of the Americans, who wouldn't protect the priceless antiquities but would guard the oil ministry. The only problem, it later turned out, was that the museum was not looted because of American negligence after Saddam was toppled: It was plundered by Iraqi officials while Saddam was in office. Similarly, long before Saddam was toppled, he'd distributed weapons caches and piles of money throughout the country to supply his insurgency.