Dual-Use Dupes: Forfeiting the WMD debate, againby Daniel ClarkWhen organized crime uses a legitimate establishment as a cover for anillegitimate one, that's what's known as a "front." That mobsters woulduse a front to conceal their illicit activities is only to be expected.After all, they wouldn't stay in business very long if they tacked upsigns that said, "Drugs N' Prostitutes R Us." No law enforcement officerworth his donuts would ever accept a front as evidence of the nonexistenceof a criminal enterprise. Yet America has repeatedly drawn similarconclusions regarding our enemies' manipulation of dual-use facilities andtechnology.Today, it's almost unanimously accepted that President Clinton's 1998bombing of the al-Shifa chemical plant was a mistake. This conclusion isbased largely upon the revelation that the Sudanese facility was alegitimate pharmaceutical plant. The possibility that this could be true,while at the same time deadly nerve agents were produced at the samefactory, has never been given serious consideration in public debate.This, despite intelligence which found that the plant manager had been inrepeated contact with the head of Saddam Hussein's chemical weaponsprogram. What must we suppose they were saying to each other, "Hot enoughfor ya?"In 2004, The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Committee reportedto the Security Council on the missile sites that Saddam had dismantledand moved out of the country in anticipation of the American-led invasion.While showing before and after pictures of one such site, UNMOVICspokesman Ewan Buchanan explained that it had also contained dual-useequipment, including a reactor vessel, a freeze drier, and fermenters."You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with afermenter," he said. "You can also use it to breed anthrax."If America had drawn the obvious conclusion from this, the "no weapons ofmass destruction" fallacy would have never taken hold. Therefore, we musthave assumed that these, too, were innocent pharmaceutical plants. Saddampresumably disguised them as military installations so that we wouldn'tbomb them, given our recent history of curious animosity toward pillfactories.Following Saddam's overthrow, our soldiers found many large drums ofchemical agents hidden in the desert. These poisons could have been usedto produce either chemical weapons or bug spray -- so naturally, ourgovernment officially labeled them as "pesticides." Why, then, did theButcher of Baghdad conceal them in camouflaged ammunition dumps? Perhapshe was afraid of losing the element of surprise against the aphids.Now, President Obama has declared that Iran has "right" to nuclear power.Although some have found this statement shocking, it merely echoed whathas been American policy toward North Korea since the Clintonadministration. These nations' interests in nuclear energy are dubious tosay the least. Iran already has vast reserves of easily accessible oil,and North Korea has deliberately kept its people literally in the dark foryears.Of course, Obama does not endorse their ambitions of producing nuclearweapons, but the trouble is that both civilian nuclear power andweapons-grade material can be produced at the same dual-use facilities.This means that the president cannot destroy one of these countries'nuclear plants, the way Israel did to Iraq in 1981, because doing so wouldbe a violation of their "rights."Practically any object can be a "dual-use" item, in that it can be usedfor either innocent or sinister purposes. The determining factor iscontext. It matters whether a box cutter is in the pocket of a clerk atthe grocery store, or a young Muslim man boarding an airplane. It alsomatters whether a large supply of nitrogen fertilizer is being stored in apotting shed, or in an apartment full of subversive literature.Likewise, it makes a difference whether dual-use chemicals are beingtreated as military supplies by a dictator who has used chemical weaponsin the past. The meaning of a nuclear plant is different, too, when it isrun by evil maniacs who have sworn to wipe Israel off the map, or whothreaten to start lobbing missiles at Hawaii.Repeatedly, a large percentage of Americans have chosen to take dual-useitems out of context in order to give Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il and theIranian mullahs the benefit of the doubt. That's like assuming that JasonVoorhees had simply gotten lost at a beach house full of co-eds on his wayto a hockey game, for which the price of admission was one machete. Therecomes a point at which such deliberate obtuseness constitutes complicityin the inevitable crimes.-- Daniel Clark is a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance. The NewMedia Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers,journalists and grass-roots media outlets.