Time & Perspective Quote by Ahmed Chalabi

Chalabi’s sentence is a masterclass in strategic vagueness: it sounds like sober technocratic assessment while quietly doing political work. He begins with a seemingly modest caveat - “I don’t think” - which softens accountability. It’s not an assertion, it’s a posture of reasonableness. Then he introduces scale (“thousands of people”) to imply depth of expertise and, by extension, credibility. If so many engineers and scientists were involved, the logic goes, the program must have existed in a substantial, organized way.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To foreign governments and media hungry for definitive proof, he offers the tantalizing promise of imminence: the reason we can’t “talk to” key scientists “at this time” isn’t that the program is a mirage; it’s that the witnesses are temporarily inaccessible. That “at this time” is the escape hatch that keeps the claim unfalsifiable in the short term. To domestic Iraqi power-brokers, it signals inside knowledge without naming names, a way to project authority in a post-regime scramble.

Most revealing is the pivot from people to objects: “they know where the weapons are.” The pronoun “they” is deliberately unpinned. It conjures an invisible network of custodians, implying concealment and coordination - the classic architecture of suspicion. In the early-2000s context, when allegations about Iraqi weapons programs were central to the case for war and postwar legitimacy, this kind of phrasing wasn’t just descriptive; it was instrumental, offering certainty-by-proxy when hard evidence was thin.