"Steven P. McNicoll" wrote:
Ask the Bush administration. They made it an international
objective to force Iraq to prove it did not have WMD. Absurd,
yes. Par for the course for this white house? Yes.

The Iraqis were required to verify the destruction of their WMD
by the cease fire agreement of 1991. Proving that something has
been done is not proving a negative.

You can't prove that something no longer exists if you've destroyed it
(especially if you're trying to prove it to those that are bent on
invading you).

If you start with an inflated estimate of the amount of WMD in the
first place, of course nothing will convince you that all of it was
destroyed.

Iraq was compelled to submit a 10,000 page report as to it's WMD
status. To date, I have yet to hear that any aspect of that report
was false. David Kay was assigned the task of finding WMD. At one
point he gloated over a room stacked to the ceiling with documents -
every page scanned into a bank of computers. I have yet to hear
anything productive come from his efforts (which I suspect were more
to discover and destroy evidence and links of the US-supplied chemical
weapons to Iraq in the 1980's). Mobile chemical manufacturing trucks
have been proven to be Brittish trucks sold to Iraq to generate Helium
for battlefield target balloons.

The US claimed to know where the WMD were, but for baffling reasons
they never told the UN inspectors on the ground.

Look. The UN had several hundred weapons inspectors in Iraq in late
2002/early 2003. They had complete access to any site they wanted to
go. While the US was massing 150k troops nearby. What the US could
have done was to slap UN arm bands on each and every US soldier and
say that they were simply more UN inspectors. They could have just
walked into IRAQ and take up the task of looking for WMD in a
peacefull way - similar to the several hundred UN weapons inspectors
already there. There would have been NO excuse that with 150k UN
inspectors that the Iraqis could play a shell game with WMD.