Centerfield

Where are the WMD?

There's a lot of discussion in the blogosphere regarding the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- and the rather inconvenient fact that we haven't found any.

RonK offers the most complete case suggesting that our failure is likely to be ... well, permanent. That we won't find any:

Operation Desert Snipe

I see this as a bit overblown, at this point. We can certainly wait a few weeks and have a more thorough search before drawing those kind of conclusions. And there are some facts pointing the other direction -- like the thousands of chemical suits and vials of antidote we found in various places during the war. Why was an army with limited resources investing in the rather elaborate attire of chemical warfare?

Saddam's efforts to deny WMD were also a little odd. He possessed chemical stores at some point. But his strategy, when making a declaration, was to flood the UN Security Council with thousands of documents rather than submitting a more limited set dealing directly with the issue of his chemical stores. Where and when were they destroyed? He'd be interested in telling us, if such an event happened.

I don't believe any of the conspiracy theories -- that the weapons were moved to Syria, that they were incinerated by American weaponry, or that the regime destroyed them during the war just to spite us.

If he had them, they're still there. And I think there's a better than 50% chance we'll find chemical stores on a significant scale in Iraq.