Right now there is a big furor over the CIA’s intelligence failure in regard to the weapons of mass destruction. Specifically, that we thought that Iraq had them, the President said that they had them and cited it as one of the reasons we went to war, and now we can’t find them.

Let’s not forget, in all this, where the blame lies for the most important lack of intelligence. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He used them in a war against Iran. He used them against his own people. In the first Gulf War, everyone was expecting him to use them against our soldiers and Kuwait. One of the conditions of the end of the Gulf War, a condition specified in resolution after resolution by the U.N, was that Saddam Hussein destroy his weapons of mass destruction and provide documentation of what he had and where and how it was dismantled. Inspectors were to verify this.

Saddam did not provide this information.

All through the Clinton administration, this was an issue. Clinton believed the weapons existed. He authorized occasional military action to enforce the U.N. resolutions, usually in the form of precision bombing. The world tried for over a decade to learn the truth about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. All we really needed was for Saddam to tell the truth about them, and war could have been avoided. Instead he lied and played games, moving weapons around and kicking the inspector out of Iraq, and generally not living up to the conditions that halted the hostilities of the Gulf War.

If you gave me dictatorial powers and ten years, I bet that even I could arrange to have a cache of missiles dismantled to their smallest components, hidden, and ready to reassemble when no one was looking.

It’s a shame that the President chose the wording that he did when he announced this war. Maybe there was no imminent threat, or attempt to get nuclear material. Maybe the weapons were moved to another country, hidden, dismantled, or even destroyed. No, we don’t know what happened to them. But we were supposed to. And that was a good enough reason to pick up where the Gulf War left off, and remove Saddam Hussein from power.