It needs to be remembered that when Pres. Bush went to the UN to discuss the need for that august body to enforce its own resolutions against Saddam and his madcapped regime, and he discussed the dangers posed by Saddam by his WMDs, Bush used the UN's own intelligence in summarizing the threat.
Remember back in January of 2003, the UN weapons inspectors found 16 chemical warheads, and documents about Iraq's nuclear and missle programs? The discovered prompted Deputy Secty. of State Richard Armitage to say in a speech, "finding these 16 warheads just raises a basic question: Where are the other 29,984? Because that is how many empty chemical warheads the UN Special Commission estimated [Saddam] had and he has never accounted for."
By the UN inspectors' own estimates, Iraq has or had significant stockpiles of WMDs, or WMD material.
Based on the UNSCOM report to the UN Security Council in January 1999, when the UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they had been unable to account for:
-- up to 360 tonnes of bulk chemical warfare agents, including 1.5 tonnes of VX nerve agent;
-- up to 3,000 tonnes of precursor chemicals, including approximately 300 tonnes which, in the Iraqi chemical warfare program, were unique to the production of VX; growth media procured for biological agent production (enough to produce over three times the 8,500 litres of anthrax spores Iraq admitted to UN inspectors to having manufactured);
-- over 30,000 special munitions for delivery of chemical and biological agents;
-- 20 al-Hussein missles with a range of 650 km, in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 687 (Iraq had told UNSCOM that it filled these warheads with anthrax and botulinum);
-- 2,850 tonnes of mustard gas, 210 tonnes of tabun, and 795 tonnes of sarin and cyclosarin;
-- development of the Al-Samoud short-range missle (which had the capability to fly beyond the 150 km allowed by UN resolutions)
Saddam never produced evidence or documents that these weapons systems or components had been destroyed. (Link to UNSCOM documents: http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/unscmdoc.htm)
The Democrats and the pacifist left (including Scott Ritter) claim that "Bush misled the American people about the reasons for going to war in Iraq."
In reality, it's the Democrats who are misleading the American people. In President Bush's speech to the UN of Sept. 12, 2002, he outlined not one issue, but six concerns with Saddam:
-- "immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material" (note his reference to the means to deliver WMD, and to "related materials" which would include R&D infrastructure, both of which David Kay's team has found in Iraq);
-- end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it; cease persecution of its civilian population;
-- account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown, return the remains of deceased, return stolen property, and accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait;
-- end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program
Six conditions to avoid war, not one. It's the Democrats, the naysayers, the anti-war left, who have reduced the debate on Iraq to the single issue of still-unfound WMDs. And this is ironic, in that these same naysayers more than likely wouldn't have gone to war against Saddam if his agents had lobbed a nuke over the White House fence -- they all would have argued that this was "understandable" because we somehow deserved it.
Some have even twisted the evidence to claim that "It turns out there were never WMD in Iraq!"
Let's consider this claim:
While it is true that the presence of "stockpiles" of WMDs in Iraq prior to the start of the war has not been confirmed, neither has the assertion been confirmed that they never existed. While we do not know (as yet) whether WMD were in Iraq before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, we do know the following:
-- We know that Saddam had WMDs and used them on both the Iranian army, and upon the Kurds in his own country;
-- We know that pretty much every intelligence agency in the world had concluded that Saddam had WMDs;
-- We know the UN had uncovered a WMD program and the existence of actual WMDs, more than what Iraq had willingly admitted to;
-- We know that Saddam also violated fourteen UN resolutions related to Iraq's disarmament and inspection of his weapons program;
-- We know that Saddam violated the terms of the ceasefire which ended the Gulf War in 1991; these violations essentially continued that conflict until the US-led coalition in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" brought the 12-year old conflict to a final conclusion;
-- We know, based upon what David Kay's inspection team discovered up to the interim report in October 2003, that Iraq had the infrastructure, the technical expertise, and the growth media for an aggressive WMD development program;
-- We also know from David Kay's report in October of 2003 that Saddam was developing a delivery system of long-range missles which could have been used for WMDs, in violation of UN resolutions;
-- We also know that pre-war intelligence is never completely accurate, and can only be confirmed or refuted by on-the-ground information gathering after battle has concluded, and that "empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information." (David Kay, presentation to the CIA, Oct. 2, 2003 Source: http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2003/david_kay_10022003.html)
So, is the anti-war left telling us that given all we knew a year ago, we were STILL not justified in toppling Saddam?
So, were there WMDs in Iraq? Are there WMDs in Iraq? Charles Krauthammer offers a plausible answer:
Rolf Ekeus, living proof that not all Swedish amrs inspectors are fools, may have been right.
Ekeus headed the U.N. inspection team that from 1991 to 1997 uncovered not just tons of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq but a massive secret nuclear weapons program as well. This after the other Swede, Hans Blix, then director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had given Saddam Hussein a perfectly clean bill of health on being non-nuclear. Indeed, Iraq had a seat on the IAEA board of governors.
Ekeus theorizes that Hussein decided years ago that it was unwise to store mustard gas and other unstable and corrosive poisons in barrels, and also difficult to conceal them. Therefore, rather than store large stocks of weapons of mass destruction, he would adapt the program to retain an infrastructure (laboratories, equipment, trained scientists, detailed plans) that could "break out" and ramp up production when needed. The model is Japanese "just in time" manufacturing, where you save on inventory by making and delivering stuff in immediate response to orders. Except that Hussein's business was toxins, not Toyotas.
The interim report of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay seems to support the Ekeus hypothesis. He found infrastructure, but as yet no finished product.
As yet, mind you....Hussein's practice was to store his chemical weapons unmarked amid his conventional munitions, and we have just begun to understand the staggering scale of Hussein's stocks of conventional munitions. Hussein left behind 130 known ammunition caches, many of which are more than twice the size of Manhattan. Imagine looking through "600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordnance" -- rows and rows stretched over an area the size of even one Manhattan -- looking for barrels of unmarked chemical weapons....
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A6320-2003Oct9¬Found=true
Whether actual WMDs will ever be found in Iraq is problematic. (Remember: Saddam buried entire aircraft in the sand prior to the Gulf War in 1991.) But, again, we know 1) Saddam had such weapons, 2) he used them, 3) he hid the elements of his WMD program from UN inspectors until they were discovered, and 4) even with the absense of WMDs in Iraq, Saddam had the expertise, the resources, and the infrastructure to quickly manufacture WMDs whenever needed.
Conclusion: Saddam was a threat to the region, and to this nation. It's the only sane conclusion one could reach.