Where are they, Mr. President? (Buchanan about no WMD found so far in Iraq)

After each war, historians sift through the record to discern its real causes. Invariably, they divide into two camps: the court historians who defend the war leaders and the revisionists who prosecute them before the bar of history.

After World War II, the evidence that FDR had steered us into war, while asserting he was doing his best to avert war, was so massive even his court historians admit he lied. Wrote Thomas A. Bailey in FDR's defense, "He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for his own good."

Roosevelt had cut off Japan's oil, sent the Flying Tigers to China and sought to tempt Japan into attacking a line of picket ships. He had lied about German subs torpedoing U.S. destroyers and Nazi plans to conquer South America and replace the Christian cross with the swastika. This mattered in 1950. For, with Stalin triumphant in Europe and China, it appeared – in Churchill's phrase – that we "had killed the wrong pig."

But today, with the immense focus on the Holocaust, the question is no longer, "Did FDR lie?" But, "Why did we not declare war sooner?"

Vietnam was, in Reagan's phrase, "a noble cause." But because it was a lost cause, it is now said and believed we only went to war because LBJ had misled us about the Tonkin Gulf incident.

The war in Iraq is being portrayed by the president's men as a just and necessary war that removed a mortal peril. But if our victory turns to ashes in our mouths, and we discover that we have inherited our own West Bank in Mesopotamia, the White House will have to explain again why we went there.

In his speech from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln, President Bush told the nation, "With those attacks (of 9-11), the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got" – i.e., the invasion of Iraq was payback for the killers of Sept. 11.

But is this the truth? For this war on Iraq was not sold to the nation as retribution for 9-11. Indeed, the ties between Iraqi intelligence and the al-Qaida killers turned out to be bogus War Party propaganda.

We were told, rather, that Saddam had gas and germ weapons and was working on nuclear weapons. And once he had them, he would use them on us, or give them to Osama. "Do you want to wait for a nuclear 9-11?" Americans were asked.

Trusting the president, believing that he had information we did not, a majority of Americans approved of pre-emptive war. But where, now, are the thousands of artillery warheads and terror weapons the president and secretary of state told us Saddam had?

We have scoured Iraq for a month. No Scuds have been found. No chemical or biological weapons. No laboratories or production lines. No evidence that Iraq was building nukes or seeking fissile material.

"Every statement I make today is backed up by ... solid sources," Colin Powell told the United Nations. But since then, his case has crumbled. Were he a district attorney, Colin Powell would be under investigation today for prosecutorial incompetence or possible fraud. One British document he relied on turned out to be a 10-year-old term paper by a graduate student. The documents from Niger proving Iraq was seeking "yellowcake" for nuclear bombs turned out to be forgeries – and crude ones at that.

Who forged them? Why have we not been told? Does the secretary who put his integrity on the line not want to know?

If our occupation of Iraq turns sour and U.S. troops are being shot in the back, a year from now, Americans are going to demand to know. And President Bush could face the charge thrown up in the face of FDR by Clare Boothe Luce, that he "lied us into war."

Both the president and Powell are honorable men. If they misled us, surely it is because they themselves were misled. It is impossible to believe either man would deliberately state as fact what he knew to be false. But the president must find these weapons – or find the men who told him, with such certitude, that Iraq had them.

For there is something strange here. If Saddam had these weapons, why did he not surrender them to save himself? If he did not give them up because he intended to use them on us, why did he not use them on us? And if they were destroyed before the war, why did he not simply show us where, and thereby save himself, his family and his regime?

Last fall, Congress abdicated, surrendered its war-making power to a president who demanded that Congress yield it up. If Congress wishes to redeem itself, it should unearth the truth about why we went to war. Was the official explanation the truth, or was it political cover for an American imperial war?

To tell you the truth, the only way Buchanan can get on TV is by criticizing the Republicans; that's his only hope.

I never thought of it that way. I think that's because his shtick is to criticize someone (anyone!) at all times. If Al Gore were president today, Buchanan would be having a four-hour show every day in which he blabbed about Gore's inept way of handling (enter any item here) [foreign policy][the economy][China][gay marriage][the U.N.][etc.].

I will never forget Buchanan's legendary complaint about the United Nations, and how the U.S. owed no respect to a U.N. Secretary General (Boutros Boutros Ghali) "whose sense of self-importance is so inflated that we have to say his name twice."

Or his warning, on the campaign trail in 2000, to a group of Chinese journalists covering the 2000 campaign: "If I am elected President, we won't be buying any more chopsticks from you Communists for our Chinese restaurants here in the U.S."

I am sure that we will find WM.

However, we also need to remember that supposing that we do not, that doesn't mean that Saddam didn't have any.

Remember when we tested the Euphrates as a routine water test and found cyanide and mustard gas? They could have dumped a substantial amount somewhere, we had biologists say that they were told to destroy the bioexperiments they were working on.

Powell said we have satellite images of Syria doing chemical weapons test and I think Rumsfeld mentioned that we know that Saddam sent some of it over to Syria.

I think we already have quite a bit of evidence. We also knew beyond any doubt that Saddam had them in the mid-90-s, and he never accounted for them.

Here is an excerpt from Clinton's speech to the JCS & Pentagon in 1998:
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http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/02/17/transcripts/clinton.iraq/

But for all our promise, all our opportunity, people in this room know very well that this is not a time free from peril, especially as a result of reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals.

We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. They feed on the free flow of information and technology. They actually take advantage of the freer movement of people, information and ideas.

And they will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen.

There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. His regime threatens the safety of his people, the stability of his region and the security of all the rest of us.

And I want them to understand what we must do to protect the national interest, and indeed the interest of all freedom-loving people in the world.

Remember, as a condition of the cease-fire after the Gulf War, the United Nations demanded not the United States the United Nations demanded, and Saddam Hussein agreed to declare within 15 days this is way back in 1991 within 15 days his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them, to make a total declaration. That's what he promised to do.

Now, instead of playing by the very rules he agreed to at the end of the Gulf War, Saddam has spent the better part of the past decade trying to cheat on this solemn commitment. Consider just some of the facts:

Iraq repeatedly made false declarations about the weapons that it had left in its possession after the Gulf War. When UNSCOM would then uncover evidence that gave lie to those declarations, Iraq would simply amend the reports.

For example, Iraq revised its nuclear declarations four times within just 14 months and it has submitted six different biological warfare declarations, each of which has been rejected by UNSCOM.

In 1995, Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law, and the chief organizer of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more.

Then and only then did Iraq admit to developing numbers of weapons in significant quantities and weapon stocks. Previously, it had vehemently denied the very thing it just simply admitted once Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected to Jordan and told the truth. Now listen to this, what did it admit?

It admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs.

And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production.

Now, let's imagine the future. What if he fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made?

Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction.

And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal. And I think every one of you who's really worked on this for any length of time believes that, too.

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