Let's go over this again...

Mike over at Cold Fury reiterates some very important points regarding Iraq, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, how intelligence works, and why we were justified in removing Saddam from power. You can read his post here.

Some choice excerpts:

And flawed interpretation of intelligence is simply not the point anyway. There are three facts pertaining here that evidently need to be stated and restated: 1) that the onus was on Saddam to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that he had in fact destroyed the weapons that we knew he had - and not on the current administration to prove their continued existence; 2) that he do so within fifteen days of agreeing to the cease-fire; and 3) that he not actively pursue the development and acquisition of such weapons ever again.

Saddam did none of those things. He was in direct, clear violation of the terms of the cease-fire right from the beginning; Saddam was subject to perfectly legitimate and justified removal from power not merely since UN Resolution 1441 (which an alarmingly large number of people really ought to read again, apparently), but from April 3, 1991 - the date of the adoption of UN Resolution 687, which says in part:

8. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of: (a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities; (b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;

Saddam was never in compliance with any of the multiple resolutions calling for his cooperation as demanded in 687 and all the others. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s not even the half of it.

Iraq was a member of the UN. That means it was legally bound to comply with UN resolutions. Failure to comply should have resulted in action by the UN, but they refused to do anything. So we, with help from various other nations, most notably Great Britain and Australia, did what the UN lacked the will to do.

if Saddam didn’t have them and had destroyed them according to the agreements he had made years ago, why would he risk a war he knew he couldn’t win to keep us all thinking he still had them? Why would Saddam have put himself into that sewer-smelling rathole he was found in when all he had to do to avoid that fate was invite the inspectors in with open arms and give them documentation of the destruction of the WMDs? He could have ended Iraq’s pariah-nation status, started to repair the damage done by years of sanctions, discontinued the no-fly zones, and gone blithely on with enriching himself at the expense of his own people for the rest of his natural life without so much as a murmur of protest from the saintly UN with one simple gesture. And he didn’t do it.

I think it ought to be obvious to anyone who’s not a fully paid-up member of the Bushate Brigade that Bush believed that Saddam still possessed WMDs. And I also happen to think that there’s more than ample reason for the sensible among us to believe that he did in fact have them, and that the stalling and dickering at the UN allowed him time to remove them to another location for safekeeping (best guess: Syria) until the pressure was off and the storm had blown over. Given the conduct of previous administrations, his apparent belief that Bush would eventually leave him be in the face of opposition to war from states like France and Germany - who had a proven vested interest in continuing the status quo in Iraq - was at least somewhat justified. The thing that really tripped Saddam up was 9/11, and his underestimation of the impact that those 3000 dead had not just on Bush but on all of us.

One current theory is that Iraq didn't have many, if any, WMD's but Saddam didn't know it. His top people mislead him for any number of plausible reasons. Even in this case, all the evidence available to us outside Iraq indicated that they existed. Assuming this is true, everyone else was deceived the same way Saddam was.

And what was the proper course of action to take to guarantee American security in the post-9/11 age?

The Left’s answer was the same thing it’s always been: to trust in the strength of negotiations and diplomacy in the face of abundant evidence of their failure, to rely on the UN to enforce its resolutions in the face of mounting evidence that it lacked the will, and to basically continue on as if 9/11 had never happened - to keep trying to kick that football after Lucy has pulled it away for the thousandth time.

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result when all the previous attempts ended up the same is one definition of insanity. Sure, it would be nice if diplomacy and negotiation could solve all the world's problems. The problem with the belief that they will is that it is predicated on the assumption that the other guy wants the same thing.

Read the comments to the post as well. The first commenter makes a very good point:

To believe that Bush lied about Iraq's WMD abilities means giving the benefit of the doubt to Saddam Hussien but not G.W. Bush. It means you assume pure motives on Saddam's part and nefarious ones on Bush's. It means you believe that Saddam should be innocent until proven guilty but that the opposite standard applies to Bush. And let me tell you,9Zlabelieve such things is nothing short of demented.