The Post on WMD

The Washington Post’s lead editorial today, on the WMD/Niger controvesy, is relatively sensible: “Wait for the Facts.” The Post acknowledges that the President’s statement about British intelligence in the State of the Union was true, and says:
“The Africa nugget, after all, formed a small part of the president’s argument — and like other questionable parts of the administration’s case, it was widely disputed before the war. The heart of the argument — that Iraq had repeatedly defied disarmament orders from the United Nations — was endorsed in December by all 15 members of the U.N. Security Council, and remains indisputable. Similarly, the conclusion that Saddam Hussein had retained chemical and biological weapons was one shared by the Clinton administration as well as every major Western intelligence service. That conclusion is now being challenged, but it hasn’t yet been disproved; nor has it been established that Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program. Indeed, the recent unearthing of designs and machinery for producing bomb-grade material in a scientist’s garden seems more suggestive than the discrediting of the report on Niger.”

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