Mark,

Wishful thinking is believing that Mr. Hussein possessed hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons when its clear and obvious that he didn't. And just because military equipment is buried is insufficient to surmise that it was used for manufacture of biological weapons. The only conclusion you can draw is that it was buried. You can't extropolate that fact to "prove" the purpose for which things were used. That's just idle speculation. You can't even address the motivation for burying it.

As for "evidence" of chemical and biological weapons, it has nothing to do with "precursors." We have no evidence of any such precursors. We based that claim upon an admission by Saddam Hussein himself back in the early 1990's.

I have no doubt that Iraq destroyed the stuff in the mid- to late 1990s. Heck, most of it was useless by that time anyway...there is a limit to the shelf life of this stuff. And, its clear that U.N. inspections prevented him from weaponizing it so why keep it? Mr. Hussein's problem is that his bumbling, under-funded and corrupt bureaucracy failed to account for what they did to get rid of it. He couldn't prove to either U.N. inspectors or U.S. intelligence operatives that he actually did. He was too busy building palaces and monuments to himself to cross his "t's" and dot his "i's".