Centerfield

Let us play the "what if" game and take Biden at his word. He said that back in 2002, many people on the Intel committee thought that in the likely event sanctions were lifted, Saddam would have reconstituted his WMD programs by 2007. What would Byrd be saying now? Would he advocate sending our troops to remove dictators with WMD? How many would be killed and what terrorists would have WMD because of Saddam's reaction to our invasion?

We are playing the same game with Iran and to a certain extent, Syria.

What if Iraq did move WMD materials to Syria under the pretense of airlifting natural disaster relief? Has Byrd commented on Saddam’s secret tape recordings in which he discusses WMD and his plan to “use” terror groups? Has the media focus attention on Syrian WMD programs? Now, do we know the signature of NK uranium enrichment? How well do we know the signature of Iranian WMD? Without this knowledge, it will be hard to ascertain where WMD came from should they end up here.

I championed Evolution with my Liberal friends for years as Intelligent Design sought a place in science class. It seems reasonable questions and objectivity do not apply to foreign policy or national security. In these cases, political fumblementalism is the prime directive. Nope, you can't have it both ways.

Not finding WMD destroyed Bush’s credibility, and called into question everything that happened up to the war and every action since. It also affected the way we conducted the war, at least as far as the insurgency goes. If there had been stockpiles of gas, anthrax, a nuclear weapons program and confirmation of a terrorist link we would be have more likely to support a fairly ruthless suppression of the Ba’athist lead Sunni insurgency, much like the denazification of Germany. But it is a matter of degree, if all we found was rusting mustard gas containers, a bio weapons lab that had generated no important research results and a nuke program in name only we would be in the same place.

We'd still have security failures.