It's been over a month since we won the war in Iraq, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction have yet to be found. They were one of the key reasons for going to war in the first place: Iraq, we asserted, had such weapons, and though we couldn't prove it, we're sure they were there. (On the 6 April 2003 Meet the Press, moderator Tim Russert asks Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, "And you have no doubt we'll find [WMDs] in substantial numbers." Wolfowitz replies, "I've never seen the intelligence community as unified and confident in their basic judgment here.") Or we didn't want to prove it and reveal just how much intelligence information we had. But as late as 1998, U.N. weapons inspectors found WMDs, which is the reason they were kicked out. Where have these weapons gone since then? In the unlikely event that Iraq actually complied with U.N. orders, the weapons may actually have been destroyed. Armed forces have found several probable mobile weapons laboratories, but no WMDs.

Or maybe there never were WMDs on the scale we imagined them. Well-known Republican pundit Rush Limbaugh, always the Republicans' faithful bloodhound (bringing them their slippers and fetching the paper whenever asked), has done the job of backtracking for the administration. He maintains that WMDs were in fact not an integral reason for going into Iraq, and that our failure to find them doesn't mean the war is suddenly unjustified. (On his website is a link to a CIA report about Iraq WMDs, published in October, 2002.) This is a personal vendetta of mine: Rush is really very incorrect when he says that WMDs were not an integral reason for going into Iraq. A LexisNexis search of "'weapons of mass destruction' and 'iraq' and 'war'" returns over 1,000 documents, even in the time span of six months, and even when the source list is constrained to just the New York Times.

Unless WMDs were made out to be the primary reason for going to war, while the Pentagon knew full well they didn't exist. In a Vanity Fair interview released 30 May 2003, Wolfowitz remarks, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason [. . .]" (I was suspicious about this quote when I originally read it in a Yellow Times release. Indeed, it exists, and Wolfowitz said it.) Later, in an interview with Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post, Wolfowitz clarifies: "There has been a tendency to emphasize the weapons of mass destruction issue. But, as I said in the fuller quote, the real thing that has concerned the President from the beginning and which I think is even the 'axis' that's referred to in the 'axis of evil' is the connection between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. So in a way, that's always been the main thing. But if you look at where the intelligence community tends to go, the issue about weapons of mass destruction has never been in controversy." So, according to Wolfowitz, the WMD issue was played up in an effect to get popular support for the war even though the intelligence community (whatever that is; maybe it's next door to the old folks' gated community) knew that WMDs were not as big an issue as they were trumped up to be.

Yellow Times also has also published an editorial written by guest editorialist Imad Khadduri, who worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 to 1998. "There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," he says. Khadduri asserts that most Iraq weapons were destroyed in 1995, and Iraq's nuclear weapons program "had already come to a halt on the first night of bombing in January 1991."

If the WMDs are there, let the weapons inspectors go in. What have you got to hide, U.S. intelligence?