Also, why do you deny the report put out by Bush's appointed team?
This is not the Democrats saying so but a team that directly answers to Bush and the results are accepted by Bush. The results being that: "Duelfer reported then that Saddam Hussein not only had no weapons of mass destruction and had not made any since 1991, but that he had no capability of making any either."
Now what?
I guess it's a shame that hanoi john didn't win, then maybe we could have asked him where did he get his information that Hussein had wmds.
In the area of weapons of mass destruction, we know that:
Saddam Hussein in the far and recent past had an active chemical and biological weapons program.
Saddam had as recently as 1998 significant stockpiles of these weapons, according to both U.S. intelligence and U.N. weapons inspectors, who had seen and catalogued this stockpile.
The Baathist regime used these chemical and biological weapons on at least half a dozen instances.
Saddam provided no significant evidence to inspectors in 2002-2003 that he had destroyed any of this stockpile.
In 1998, the Clinton administration launched an intensive, though short, preemptive air war against Iraq because it was convinced that Saddam’s WMD program was unchecked.
The Iraqi dictatorship was reasonably close to obtaining nuclear weapons on two occasions in the past, and was prevented from doing so only by military force. In 1981, an Israeli air strike crippled the Osirik nuclear reactor which had been producing nuclear material for bomb use. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm again crippled Iraq’s nuclear program, which experts later estimated had been within one year of developing a bomb.
The Iraqi dictatorship retained the scientific know-how and the services of many of the scientists who had been active in its previous nuclear efforts. It also coordinated the concealment of equipment necessary for a nuclear program. Recently, an Iraqi nuclear scientist led allied forces to a key piece of equipment that he had been instructed to bury under a rose bush at his home.
Likewise, in late April, an Iraqi scientist involved in the biological and chemical weapons program led Americans to a site in the desert where chemical components for chemical weapons had been buried by the regime immediately prior to the onset of war.
In both the nuclear and chemical/biological arenas, Iraq possessed many “dual use” facilities that had been used for weapons programs and could have been again with little difficulty. For example, early in the war U.S. forces stumbled across a giant buried complex which seemed well-suited for chemical weapons production. As it turned out, the facility had been a chemical weapons plant until 1998, when it had been converted to civilian production. A vast underground facility was also discovered beneath Iraq’s main civilian atomic research center, filled with sealed barrels of uranium. Upon investigation, the site was known to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had sealed the uranium. In neither case was there any significant barrier to the reconversion of those facilities for WMD purposes on short notice.
As was widely reported, two mobile laboratories have been captured, and many (though not all) weapons analysts consider it either probable or possible that they were used for biological weapons development.
Along the route to Baghdad, large numbers of Iraqi troops were killed or captured in possession of gas masks. Military headquarters and bases were consistently found stocked with chemical warfare suits and large stockpiles of nerve gas antidote.