Let’s Revisit the Issue of Iraq’s WMDs

The Democrats’ political strategy, apparently, is to yammer about our intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction–the world’s intelligence, actually–until next year’s election. OK, it’s a deal.

Dafydd ab Hugh sums up just a small part of what we know about Saddam’s weapons programs, and the weapons that his armed forces maintained prior to the 2003 invasion. A brief excerpt from a long post:

It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that ‘no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.’

There is a great deal to be said on this subject, and most of it is already in the public domain. The fact is that the intelligence agencies’ official consensus estimate expressed a high level of confidence that Saddam possessed both chemical and biological weapons. The U.N. didn’t disagree, contrary to popular assumptions and Hans Blix’s revisionist history. As we have noted here before, the U.N.’s UNMOVIC reports emphasized the large quantities of banned materials for which Iraq had failed to account.

This is a big topic, as is the subject of Iraq’s many connections with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. In my opinion, we should take up the Democrats’ challenge: most Americans know all too little about the threats posed by Saddam’s Iraq. Let’s talk about those threats from now until November 2006.

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