In response to my piece yesterday on chemical weapons found in Iraq, Daniel writes:

Mr. Maloney,

While I enjoy most of your articles, I cringed at this article because it really doesn’t prove anything. Even on Fox News they admit that nothing that they have found is evidence that Iraq had an on-going WMD program at the time we invaded. I agree with the gist of the article, though, that Saddam repeatedly lied and Democrats believed he had WMD’s, etc., but I think the recent press release by Senator Santorum was little more than a publicity stunt before the vote on troop withdrawal. Maybe some useable WMD’s are yet to be found in Iraq, but I found the recent press release to be pretty inconsequential.

Daniel

Daniel,

You are correct that the new revelations do not prove that Iraq had an active weapons program. But these weapons do prove that Iraq was in complete failure to comply with the U.N. resolutions that required him to turn over a full catalog of his weapons, and to destroy the very types of weapons that we’ve since found. Clearly, he did not do either. And either of those alone would have been enough justification for action under U.N. Resolution 1441, the 17th consecutive U.N. resolution that Saddam Hussein was violating.

Add that to the fact that Saddam Hussein had been gaming the U.N. inspections for years and apparently bribing U.N. officials as well. Those are not the actions of a man with nothing to hide, and point to the possibility that Saddam was trying to escape the noose of the U.N. sanctions so that he could restart his weapons program once the sanctions had been lifted.

I think the discovery of these weapons is relevant, considering that one of the prime arguments against the war for the last few years has been that no WMDs have been found. That’s not true, and as I pointed out in my original piece, that hasn’t been true for a long time.

Because I covered previously-discovered weapons in the past, these new revelations didn’t strike me as the bombshell that others claimed it was. But it is one more bit of evidence showing that the rationale for deposing Saddam Hussein was sound.

Thanks for writing,
Evan