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 Euro-American left 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 five 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
Five conditions to avoid war, not one. It's the Democrats, the naysayers, the media, 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.
So, memo to the Polish president: If you were "misled" about Iraq's WMD, join the club, because we were also "suckered" by the UN's own findings!
The facts are more likely that nobody was misled, but that Saddam moved the WMD into Syria and Iran, and/or so cleverly hid them they have not yet been found. It says a lot about the Euro-American left that they would jump to the conclusion that "Bush lied," rather than suspect a conspiracy on the part of the other Axis of Evil member states to cover-up Iraq's WMD program.