They never had WMD, Mission Accomplished, now BRING THEM HOME!!!

Saddam is dead.
Uday is dead
Qusay is dead.
Chemical Ali soon will be dead. Huh, how did he get that name? Using WMD on the Kurds for one thing.

Parliamentary democracy in Iraq.

Terrorist groups including AQ being decimated (Zarqawi is dead - was in Iraq both Baghdad and then no man's land before 2003)

Iran prevented from influence in any portion of Iraq.

Shia voted for a united Iraq.
Kurds voted for a united Iraq.
And now Sunnis part of a united Iraq.

An example for Pakistan to follow.

"Chemical Ali soon will be dead. Huh, how did he get that name? Using WMD on the Kurds for one thing."

You mean the chemical weapons Reagan & Rumsfeld provided Iraq? The same folks who then ignored the Kurdish atrocity for 2 years until it proved useful as propaganda in the 1st Gulf War?

Yeah, Saddam was just a peace-loving, though misunderstood moderate, who never had any desire whatsoever to build nuclear weapons.

I guess that 550 metric tons of yellow cake uranium was fertilizer for one of Saddam's gardens.

An intrigуing argument, for those interested in these kinds of considerations rather than the usual snorts of derision, is Bush's reference to the situation that could well have come into existence had Saddam Hussein remained in power, the UN sanctions lifted (that was the direction things were going), AND the Iranians, as they are currently doing, sustaining their efforts in the likely direction of development of nuclear weapons. Given past Iraq-Iranian history, how would Iraq under Hussein likely have reacted to Iran activities in this area? Perhaps some kind of preemptive attack or, free of UN sanctions, the claim of a right to develop such weapons himself in an act of self-defense? They are interesting considerations to those pondering possibilities free of the need to simply polemicize against Bush. Can one imagine a situation in that neck of the woods where both Iraq and Iran had nuclear weapons? Is it so far-fetching? Reflecting on these things isn't an argument by itself one way or another, but it seems to me to be entirely justified to think about them a bit. What a novel idea that, just maybe, the world IS a fair bit better off without Saddam? Perish the thought...

The Bush administration knew full well there were no WMD but according to Bush, god told him to attack Iraq so the absence of WMD was just an insignificant formality. I guess god also told him to hire Blackwater, a mercenary group that shot and killed innocent Iraqi civilians, run guns to the insurgents and lord only knows what else. Now that some of these murders are coming to trial maybe more people will see this corrupt administration for what it really is.

Click, click, pull...mission accomplished!

Whether or not there were WMD's is not important; what IS important is the Bush policy of pre-emptive wars. Do you have the right to kill your neighbor because he bought a gun and you think he might kill you? Absolutely not, and neither did Bush. I wonder... who has more blood on their hands - George Bush or Saddaam Hussein.

Let's see...and how about the yellowcake forgeries that were uncovered by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, a week before Bush peddled it to us in the 2003 union address?

And Bush personally forbade the Pentagon in 2002 from conducting airstrikes on the cyanide and ricin labs in the no fly zone that only the US could access, not Saddam, which led to the attempted ricin attack in London, and the cyanide new york subway plot that was canned but whose plotters were never brought to justice, and which White House never gave Congress knowledge of?

Lanny Edwards' post is indiciative of the reason why there can't be a rational discussion of the WMD issue for at least a decade...or three.

There are too many people so devoted to their hatred of Bush, devotion bordering on religious fervor, that they will never acknowlege facts which do not agree with their view, much less accept them.

Whatever will the NY Times and other bloggers on the internet do when George Bush is no longer president and they can't blame everything that has ever happened in the last 20 years on him.
Obviously their god Obama will not be investigated, maligned and in general made the goat of anything that happens.
I guess they will have to go out of business because there are no conservatives to blame everything on.

Bush said, "It's hard for me to speculate." That's exactly what he, Chaney et al were doing when they decided to invade Iraq.

He had WMD, that WE GAVE HIM during the Iran-Iraq war! When the troops secured those areas in '91 they saw the containers had MADE IN THE USA stamped on them!!! Watch "Beyond Treason" (Google) our troops are dying to defend against a treat allright, Our OWN arms sales to despots and dictators!!! Investigate, it's all there. You have a computer, Go for it!!!

Remember, lots of democrats were touting the WMD mantra back then.

The debate over WMD will never be settled. It is not interest of most members of congress from both party to get to the bottom of truth. To get to the truth would require to make some difficult decision and some moral courage. Very few members from both side of the aisle have shown that. In US senate, I can think of John McCain and Fiensgold as two people who have held unpopular stance. Rest stick their finger in air and then go with flow.

Maybe we could have achieved all of the same results in Iraq without mismanaging a potentially unnecessary war. But we will never know because Bush did not even try anything else. Violence is the first resort of the incompetent. I had four different mid level and low level Navy intelligence and Navy Spec War people tell me BEFORE the invasion that we would not find any WMD. If some of the junior people in the intelligence community knew that, why didn't the senior people? Willful ignorance maybe? Senior Bush sychophants filtering the information to ensure that Bush had what they knew he wanted and needed to hear to justify what he wanted to do maybe? Manufacturing plausible deniability is not that hard. And if pre-emptive self defense is such a great idea, then it would be perfectly acceptable for say, Syria to invade Israel, or North Korea to invade South Korea, or Russia to invade Poland (again) as long as they claim that pre-emptive self defense is necessary because the other country "is a threat." And lest I forget, that concept now means that it was okay for Japan to attack Pearl Harbor because we were a threat to them and so pre-emptive self defense was appropriate. Or is pre-emptive self defense for a perception of threat only good enough for Bush?

Grand Old Party 4:33:44 PM: "…that 550 metric tons of yellow cake uranium was fertilizer…"
Nope, it was left over from Iraq's earlier research on developing nuclear power, but it shows the absurdity of Bush's claim that Saddam was seeking to buy yellowcake in Niger for a nuclear program. He already had yellowcake; he no longer had a nuclear program.
The other interesting part is that Bush continues to lie by saying that Saddam shut out Blix's weapons inspectors. They were in Iraq; they had full access to wherever they wanted to go; there were no WMD as they accurately reported; all the American intelligence they followed up on was worthless; Bush made them leave so he could launch his illegal Shock And Awe Campaign.
One last thing: Steve Clemons of The Washington Note points out that Richard Prince-of-Darkness Perle told him in 2002 that there were no WMD in Iraq. Perle was closely connected with the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz gang and so it's reasonable to assert that lack was well known among those who used WMD as a selling point for war.
"…First, Richard Perle told me in October 2002 that "we would not find WMDs in Iraq." Richard Perle said this to me in a conversation which I have written about before -- and at that point, Perle was still very much a part of the inner circle of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and other fellow travelers. We have many others who have since made clear that the administration cherry-picked intelligence that fit pre-held biases towards war…"

"I guess that 550 metric tons of yellow cake uranium was fertilizer for one of Saddam's gardens."

Ha. Suuure.

No one attempts to ask boosh under oath about their known lies about WMD's?

Yet, they ask Clinton about consensual s/e/x under oath?

Wow.

"Remember, lots of democrats were touting the WMD mantra back then."

Nice try . I believed boosh's and powells lies too, initially.

No pres. or secretary of state would lie about something so sinister?

YET THEY DID. Hence boosh and cheney had Plame outted,along with all the other agents that worked for that front company.

That was TREASON.

There is no point crying over spilled Milk. Afghanistan is falling with a noose around Kabul, Zimbabawe is in serious crisis, terrorism from Pakistani soil is spreading, there are plenty of opportunities for the Bush Admin to redeem itself. Move on and act now or yes the legacy will be WMD