No WMD Found Yet

About Finding WMD in Iraq

James Taranto makes the following excellent point in his daily Best of the Web column on Monday (toward the bottom of the third item):

In the Independent, Andrew Gumbel offers another complaint: As far as we know, coalition forces haven't yet found any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "Many influential people . . . have begun to wonder aloud if the weapons exist at all."

This is just goofy. Saddam is known to have had such weapons in the 1990s, and U.N. resolutions obliged him to destroy them and account for their destruction. He never offered any such accounting. So in order to doubt that Iraq lacks weapons of mass destruction, you have to believe that Saddam destroyed them and then didn't bother to tell anyone about it.

Gumbel's impatience for weapons of mass destruction is downright infantile. He pounds the table and demands to know why the coalition hasn't found them and announced it publicly in three weeks--during which time the coalition has been busy waging a military campaign. Weren't we hearing just a few weeks back that the U.N. inspectors needed many more months to find these weapons?

End quote.

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