So about those weapons of mass destruction…

I know it’s churlish of me to keep harping on about this, but:

…investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen—combining pox virus and snake venom—that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a “grave and gathering danger” by President Bush and a “mortal threat” by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

[…]

The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s. Kamel, who had married one of Saddam Hussein’s daughters, Raghad, and controlled Baghdad’s Military Industrial Commission, told his Western debriefers about major programs in biological and nuclear weaponry that had gone undetected or unconfirmed. Iraq was forced to acknowledge what he exposed, but neither inspectors nor U.S. officials were sure Kamel had told all there was to tell.

A handwritten Iraqi damage report, composed five days after the defection, now suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out.

[…]

The most significant point in [Hossam] Amin’s letter, U.S. and European experts said, is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons.

Washington Post

So Saddam’s brother-in-law, #1 in charge of weapons programs, personally defects and sings like a canary. The story says he told us about “major programs”; what it doesn’t mention is that he told us they were all shut down. However, the government didn’t want to believe him, and we went ahead with the war anyway. Now we discover from the reports of Iraq’s #1 guy in charge of intelligence, that Saddam’s brother-in-law was telling the truth. Well, duh.