Free Republic

The piece is available by subscription only. Given its importance, I have taken the liberty of publishing it in full: Just over a year ago Charles Duelfer was almost murdered by a suicide bomber in Baghdad. He was saved by the Kansas National Guardsmen in his security detail, who sacrificed their lives for his. The incident provides an allegory for what is happening in Iraq — a struggle, in Duelfer’s words, between ‘the worst of humanity and the best of humanity’, a war between the forces of destruction and creation. It is a struggle in which there can be no...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 - A new report on Iraq's illicit weapons program is expected to conclude that Saddam Hussein's government had a clear intent to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons if United Nations sanctions were lifted, government officials said Thursday. But, like earlier reports, it finds no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year, the officials said. The most specific evidence of an illicit weapons program, the officials said, has been uncovered in clandestine labs operated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, which could have produced small...