Ummm ... Excuse me. What exactly does "weapon of mass destruction" mean?
Not long ago, the Americans fought a war in Vietnam. (It was not a real war, you must understand, because the US never declared war against the Vietnamese. But we won't talk about that today.)
The Americans never could figure out why the Vietnamese were not prepared to fight like civilised people. They felt so strongly about their land that they were prepared to blow themselves up if it meant taking along a few of the teenaged American GIs who were scared out of their wits anyway.
The Vietnamese had a habit of hiding in bushes. So some American had an idea -- burn them bushes!
But in moist Vietnam, lush bushes don't burn too well. Something needed to be done. And so the Americans decided upon napalm.
Napalm is fun stuff. It has the consistency of jam and makes the best possible firebomb. And it's damn near impossible to put out without completely smothering it.
And if 95% of the world's wielders of Molotov cocktails took time off to read, they could figure out how to make napalm at home and win many more revolutions.
The Americans loved napalm. They made lots of it, and they dropped it on the Vietnamese whenever they could. But in their enthusiasm they made a bit too much. So much so that they have been sitting for 20 years with some 34000 napalm bombs -- about 11 kilotons -- in storage at a place called Fallbrook in southern California.
How much damage could this cause? The allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945 unleashed three kilotons of incendiaries. Death count: 50 000 at least.
The bigger component of napalm is petrol. Saddam Hussein has a lot of petrol. He also has lots of the other component (which is readily available but shall remain unnamed as napalm can be a lot worse than Lorena Bobbit.)
In this sense, Saddam is not unlike fertiliser king turned rugby emperor Louis Luyt. Why? Combined with newspaper and cotton wool and one other readily available ingredient, fertiliser can flatten the average house faster than you can say "mother of all explosions".
Or scrape together some rust and aluminium shavings and you've got something called thermite. Thermite bombs -- if you've got the mix right -- can vapourise steel.
Which then begs the question: at what point does a motor mechanic's workshop end and a manufacturing facility for weapons of mass destruction begin?
There is no correct answer. It's a question of quantity. High school kids can produce enough nitroglycerine to blow up a classroom fairly easily using readily available components. Should the school be considered a weapons manufacturing facility? Or a hospital, which very quickly can be turned into an Anthrax production facility?
This is what makes Clinton's determination to deny Iraq the means of producing "weapons of mass destruction" so ridiculous. The only way to achieve this would be to deny Baghdad any opportunity to develop any industrialised infrastructure -- in effect, condemning the country to a technological wasteland.
The Americans have the satellite capability to pinpoint Saddam's precise location. Their smart bombs can then effectively end the conflict once and for all. Why do they not do it?
The answer, probably, is that the United States needs a bogeyman. Iran's Khatami has seized the propaganda high ground of late. That leaves Saddam as all that stands between Bill's sex scandals and the support of the American people.
I hold no brief for Saddam Hussein. I care not if he chokes on his mustache. But the people of Iraq are not guilty of his crimes. To condemn them to death by bombing is inhuman.