Wait a minute...I thought Iraq had no WMD capabilities:

U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses.

In the report to the U.N. Security Council, acting chief weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos said he’s reached no conclusions about who removed the items or where they went. He said it could have been moved elsewhere in Iraq, sold as scrap, melted down or purchased.

He said the missing material can be used for legitimate purposes. “However, they can also be utilized for prohibited purposes if in a good state of repair.”

He said imagery analysts have identified 109 sites that have been emptied of equipment to varying degrees, up from 90 reported in March.

The report also provided much more detail about the percentage of items no longer at the places where U.N. inspectors monitored them.

From the imagery analysis, Perricos said analysts at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission which he heads have concluded that biological sites were less damaged than chemical and missile sites.

The commission, known as UNMOVIC, previously reported the discovery of some equipment and material from the sites in scrapyards in Jordan and the Dutch port of Rotterdam.

Perricos said analysts found, for example, that 53 of the 98 vessels that could be used for a wide range of chemical reactions had disappeared. “Due to its characteristics, this equipment can be used for the production of both commercial chemicals and chemical warfare agents,” he said.

The existence of this much “dual use” equipment—combined with the cat-and-mouse games played by Saddam Hussein whenever the weapons inspectors were in Iraq—means that we would have had to take Hussein at his word that nothing nefarious was going on. That begs the question: how much trust should we have put in Saddam Hussein?

This story also sets up a new twisted-logic opportunity for the perpetual critics of the United States. On the one hand, the fact that the equipment is dual-use means that they can still claim that Saddam Hussein had no WMD program. At the same time, they can complain the United States failed to secure this dangerous equipment after the invasion. (Of course, this assumes that we didn’t move it ourselves, which the U.N. would have no way of knowing.) By this reasoning, the equipment was completely innocuous until the day the U.S. invaded, at which point it became very dangerous. This allows the Saddam-was-never-a-threat argument to conveniently coexist with the United-States-is-completely-negligent argument. Everybody wins!