FOR THIS. And it's pissing me off.
Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on PaperDemocrats and liberals are now being flamed by the right for being angry. Screw angry. This makes me out and out seeing-red white-hot livid. Y'know, it's revelations like this that make me say that it doesn't matter anymore what rabbit this jackass pulls out of his hat from this point forward. This is totally inexcusable. Sending American kids into Iraq to be killed, maimed or harmed in any way under false motives, then shrugging your shoulders and saying "What's the difference?" is the sign of an extraordinarily depraved mind.
Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage
...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.
A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
A depraved mind with a $170,000,000.00 re-election war chest at that.
