Wednesday, October 27, 2004 :::
 
Conservative commentators, or commentators who call themselves conservative, are, in essence, crying that the explosives that were not where they were supposed to be prove that Saddam still had WMD.

The problem is, the explosives weren't there on April 10, 2003, when our troops first looked at the site, accompanied by an embedded NBC News reporter. So they just become some more dangerous items that Saddam may well have ditched.

Nor were they WMD, exactly. They could be used to trigger nuclear weapons, but, as the Iraq Survey Group has established beyond any reasonable doubt, Saddam's nuclear weapons program, such it was, was in a pretty sorry state.

John Kerry makes the far more serious point that they could be used by the terrorists who, he implies, stole them out from under the noses of our troops, except that our troops were never guarding them. Saddam may have, in a final desperate move, tossed them over to his friends in every terrorist organization in the world, or he may have gotten rid of them. In any case, we could have done nothing to prevent anything that he did with them.

What is troubling is that Sen. Kerry seems to understand neither the war nor what we should do about a very difficult situation. Just as troubling is the unwillingness of commentators who call themselves conservative to embrace the clear truth. Saddam ditched his WMD so that he could get rid of the sanctions, which were indeed near the point of falling apart when we invaded. But the earliest he could have gotten his precious WMD back was at least a year or two out from that point, which had not yet arrived. The war was necessary, in other words, but not urgent. It was even more necessary that the war be planned and carried out in a radically different fashion than it was, but it wasn't. Where to go from here is the issue, and the Democrats have not given us someone who inspires any confidence in his ability to even choose a path.

April 10, 2003, was also the first time that serious doubts about the war were raised on A Mind That Suits, on which doubts this blog has never softened.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:38 AM


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