WMD Alert. The conventional wisdom is that there are and weren't WMD in Iraq and that the President was going on bad intelligence that there were. In this way we seem to have led the world wrongly into the invasion of that country.

But wait! There have been discoveries that people are really not paying attention to. There is a good article over at Insight on the News by Kenneth Timmerman detailing exactly what we've found and why that should be adequate enough to satisfy the premise that there were weapons and weapon programs there that violated UN resolutions and international agreements.
Tons of pesticides and other chemicals and biological agents, which while they can be used for agriculture, when found in great quantities on a military arms depot, usually signifies that they are not. A line of unmanned drones that could travel well beyond the permissible limit. Scud missile propellant manufacturing. 120mm mortar shells filled with an as yet to be determined liquid (money quote: "If it wasn't a chemical agent, what was it?" Hanson asks. "More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy.") Read the whole article.

My question is, why isn't Bush defending himself against remarks that he misled the nation and took us into Iraq because of a lie (or less harsh, because of bad intelligence). There's plenty of evidence that while what the press' definition of "stockpiles" hasn't been found, enough has been found to justify what was said. I thought that same thing when I actually saw what David Kay said in his report to Congress when he stepped down. Considering the intelligence that I've seen reported, in hindsight, I might have given the order to go too. I might have used WMD as my primary excuse also, as it seemed pretty convincing at the time. Remember that most countries and the former Democratic president were convinced. Most of the weapons we thought they had are still classified as unaccounted for. Not imaginary, but missing. The UN verified that the components to make these weapons was received by Iraq, but are now unaccounted for.

The story I posted the other day (below) about Syrian weapons stored in Sudan sounds like and interesting twist to the story and may answer a few questions about the "unaccounted for" part.

All and all there were far more reasons to go than just WMD, and still far more good things that have come as a result. The most recent good thing is the exposure of the UN's Money for Oil scandal, which is only happening because we went in there and found all this documentation showing the links. Actually we freed the Iraqi people, who are raising the issue again, as they were before we invaded. We just refused to listen at all before last year.