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"Irrelevant. Saddam violated the 1991 Cease Fire agreement, and we knew he was trying to obtain WMDs. That is the bottom line, he didn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is "The War on Terror", not the "War on Al-Qaeda."

Finally....someone who has pointed out exactly what I emphasize in every discussion in which I am involved. Saddam violated the agreement that brought the Gulf War to a HALT.......not an end. He violated that agreement and therefore the war was rekindled based on Saddam's actions, intelligence (everyone chooses to forget Powell's satellite photos of the truck convoy hauling mysterious material out of Iraq when deployment was soon to become reality) and the intelligence that was obtained from intell agencies around the globe.

Whenever anyone mentions the "War in Iraq" I immediately correct them by stating, "Do you mean the War against terrorism currently focused in Iraq"?

As far as WMD's are concerned, just once, I would like to see our "objective media" ask General Pace how many military personnel currently and since the initial deployment of personnel to Iraq have been given the specific assignment of searching for and uncovering WMD's ! I would suspect that since our military is involved in fighting against a ruthless,often unidentifiable enemy, that no military personnel have been deployed exclusively to search for WMD's which I believe did and still exist in Iraq.

As you recall, it was the result of a thorough search, intell, or good luck that Iraqi military planes were found buried in the desert and the expansive/hi-tech control center was found under one of Saddam's palaces.

Finally, there are thousands of boxes of documents yet to be reviewed that may contain information about WMD's.

The point is, and you made it very well, "This is 'The War on Terror', not the 'War on Al-Quaeda". Good post.

EODGUY

Regarding WMD:

Last March, John A. Shaw, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said Russian Spetsnaz units moved WMD to Syria and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

"While in Iraq I received information from several sources naming the exact Russian units, what they took and where they took both WMD materials and conventional explosives," Mr. Shaw told NewsMax reporter Charles Smith.

Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong was deputy commander of Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In September 2004, he told WABC radio that "I do know for a fact that some of those weapons went into Syria, Lebanon and Iran."

In January 2004, David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group which conducted the search for Saddam's WMD, told a British newspaper there was evidence unspecified materials had been moved to Syria from Iraq shortly before the war.

"We know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program," Mr. Kay told the Sunday Telegraph.

Also that month, Nizar Nayuf, a Syrian journalist who defected to an undisclosed European country, told a Dutch newspaper he knew of three sites where Iraq's WMD was being kept. They were the town of al Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria; the Syrian air force base near the village of Tal Snan, and the city of Sjinsar on the border with Lebanon.

In an addendum to his final report last April, Charles Duelfer, who succeeded David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said he couldn't rule out a transfer of WMD from Iraq to Syria.

"There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation," Mr. Duelfer said.

In a briefing for reporters in October 2003, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper Jr., who was head of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency when the Iraq war began, said satellite imagery showed a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the American invasion.

"I think the people below Saddam Hussein and his sons' level saw what was coming and decided the best thing to do was to destroy and disperse," Lt. Gen. Clapper said.

You haven't heard much about these reports, because they contradict the meme that Saddam either had no WMD, or destroyed it well before the Iraq war began.

The captured files of the Iraqi intelligence service, still mostly untranslated, could shed light on what did happen to Saddam's WMD.