WMD Found in Iraq!!!

It was only a matter of time before those crack sleuths over at Red State would find the long lost Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. They finally hit pay dirt.

"31 barrels of nitric acid were found Saturday in the walled-off front yard of a house that had been raided less than two weeks earlier".

OMG!!! Umm...well, wait a minute, what is nitric acid actually used for anyway?

"Chief uses of nitric acid are in the preparation of fertilizers, e.g., ammonium nitrate, and explosives, e.g., nitroglycerin and trinitrotoluene (TNT). It is also used in the manufacture of chemicals, e.g., in making dyes, and in metallurgy, ore flotation, etching steel, photoengraving, and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel."

Ok...so aside from numerous legitimate commercial applications, it can be used to make explosives. But you can make some pretty nasty shit out of the chemicals under your kitchen sink, and every country on the face of the planet has explosives. What's so special about this?

"So, the bad guys are making chemical weapons in Iraq...chemical weapons are classified by the UN as WMDs...so there are WMDs in Iraq...wait. That can't be right. The reality-based community said they weren't."

Ahh...I see now. Some "bad guys" in Iraq are using "chemicals" to make weapons. Therefore they have "chemical weapons", which are classified by the UN as "Weapons of Mass Destruction". Quod erat demonstrandum.

Except that according to chemist George Smith, PhD.:

"[Nitric acid] wouldn't be practical as a chemical weapon and there's no way to make it so."

Oops. Ok, maybe not so much. Well, let's give the wingnuts the benefit of the doubt here, which is about all they ever get on anything anyway. Even if you accept the bullshit premise that nitric acid is being used to create chemical weapons in Iraq, then you mean to tell me that we invaded Iraq, a country that posed no actual threat to the United States and was not involved in 9/11, killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens, lost over three thousand of our own soldiers, spent over $400 billion dollars that we didn't have in the first place, and lost the respect of the entire world in the process all so we could find...wait for it...31 barrels of nitric acid in some guy's front yard?

At least they are kind enough to acknowledge which side of the ideological spectrum bases their approach to issues on reality. And one more thing: it wasn't that the "reality-based community" doubted the existence of WMD in Iraq just because Republicans and neocons were making the claim (although that fact alone is generally enough to cause suspicion). The reason for doubt by anyone with a functioning brain was that experts actually involved in searching for them, like David Kay, the man the Bush administration picked to actually find the WMD caches in Iraq, were saying they didn't exist. David Kay said the following during testimony before Congress on January 18, 2004:

“I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarized chemical weapons there.”