Posted 4:09 PM by Steve
President Bush and Republicans have been completely vindicated by recent revelations by Inspector Kay:


1. Kay did say we didn't discover major stockpiles of recently developed WMD in Iraq, but almost everything else he said supports the president's position, exposing his opponents as wrong and reckless. Kay said or implied that:

A. "The intelligence community owes the president (an apology) rather than the president owing (one to) the American people."

B. The administration did not pressure the intelligence agencies to overstate the WMD threat.

C. While Bush relied on possibly erroneous intelligence, so did Saddam himself and his generals, the Clinton administration, France, Germany and Britain.

D. "What we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than, in fact, we thought it was even before the war."

E. Iraq was a magnet for international terrorists who were free to operate there, and plan and conduct their deadly mischief. Refuge is a form of state sponsorship of terrorism. States that sponsor terrorism in the post 9/11 world must be dealt with.

F. Saddam was flagrantly violating U.N. Security Council resolutions in a number of respects and feverishly trying to do so in others. While there were supposedly no major WMD stockpiles, there were probably WMDs, some of which may have been removed to Syria in the weeks preceding our invasion. Saddam was trying to weaponize the deadly agent Ricin, and he was clearly developing missile systems in contravention of the resolutions.

G. Saddam's scientists may have duped him about their progress in developing WMD.



5. Intelligence is at best, an inexact science. It is hard to stomach all these armchair quarterbacks demanding perfection from the very intelligence organizations they and their like-minded predecessors emasculated in previous decades. If there were intelligence failures, they were probably not technological ones, but those of human intelligence (HUMINT), which is precisely what liberals weakened.

Kay admitted that it was imperative that we act anyway. The only way we could prevent Saddam from developing and using WMD or sharing them with terrorists was to remove him from power forcibly.

7. And with all due respect to Mr. Kay and others, we did not, as I've written many times before, have the burden of proving Saddam had WMD. He had the duty of proving he had destroyed them and his programs. This he deliberately and defiantly failed to do. Our "preemptive" attack was justified with or without the continued existence of WMD. In this sense, it wasn't even preemptive; it was to enforce already violated resolutions.