Krauthammer on Kay

Charles Krauthammer explains why David Kay’s report vindicates the war against Saddam Hussein. As Krauthammer notes: “the question of whether Saddam was still in the WMD business is no longer open. ‘We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities,’ Kay testified, ‘and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002′ — concealed, that is, from the hapless Hans Blix. Kay’s list is chilling. It includes a secret network of labs and safe houses within the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service; bio-organisms kept in scientists’ homes, including a vial of live botulinum; and my favorite, ‘new research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin’ — all ‘not declared to the U.N.'”
Krauthammer believes, as does former U.N. inspection team head Rolf Ekeus, that Saddam had concluded that keeping mustard gas and other poisons in barrels was unstable and hard to conceal. So he decided to retain an infrastructure that could ramp up production when needed. But the fact that Saddam may have decided “to go from building up stocks to maintaining clandestine production facilities does not mean that he got out of the WMD business.” Nor, if it matters, would that approach constitute compliance with U.N. Resolution 1441, which required a full accounting of Saddam’s WMD program and full cooperation with inspectors.

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