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You do know, I'm sure, that the yellowcake you reference (1) was in Iraq's possession before Desert Storm and before sanctions, (2) was completely known to everyone and was included in the various 'disclosures' made by Iraq, and (3) was tagged and sealed by the IAEA, and that the tags and seals were still in place when our forces initially reached al-Tuwaitha.

You know that, right?

So if he planned on using it later after sanctions were lifted and the monitoring forgotten, well See North Korea and Iran for examples...

(future without OIF)
(AP) Today Iraqi Nuclear Scientists broke seals at the Tuwaitha storage facility as EU and UN negociators pleaded with the Saddam Hussein regime to reconsider it's plans to restart nuclear enrichment following Israel's problematic West Bank withdrawl ... Baradei urged restraint on all parties and appealed to Iraq's claim of peaceful nuclear development for the nations energy needs...

Yes, I know this.

But none of that diminishes in any way the fact that Iraq had 500 tons of yellowcake uranium at a nuclear weapons development plant. Do they only count as WMDs if Saddam himself was actually standing there in the process of enriching them to weapons-grade at the moment we invaded?

I'm sure those tags and seals would have stopped Saddam's scientists from digging up a centrifuge or two out of their flowerpots and whipping up a little dirty bomb to give to Zarqawi as a hospitality gift next time he was in Baghdad recovering from a broken leg as a guest of the regime.

We also found barrels upon barrels of chemicals essential to chemical-weapons manufacturing in munitions supply facilities all across Iraq. Of course, they were labeled as "pesticides" so they were ignored as WMDs because everybody knows what a tremendous cockroach problem ammo dumps in the desert tend to have.

Iraq had WMDs. It is a fact.

I'm sorry that they didn't have enough WMDs for you, or that they were not actually loaded onto missiles and targeted directly at U.S. cities so as to "count" as WMDs, or that Saddam didn't leave them sitting around in big boxes labeled "WMDs for Killing the Great Satan" in the same places where the administration publicly announced they were while we took 14 months to ask everybody and their mother if we could, pretty please, invade Iraq.

The Bush admin has screwed a whole helluva lot of stuff up in this war (Fallujah should still be a big smoking crater IMHO), but Iraq had WMDs. Just because they were still wrapped in plastic or labeled "pool chlorine" doesn't mean they weren't there.