You can't make something into a lie just by calling it one over and over again. Not finding hard evidence of weapons in present-day Iraq does not automatically mean there never were any either, despite all the "yeti" arguments, which don't hold up as an analogy. No one has ever found yetis anywhere. Iraq had a full-bore WMD program going before the first Gulf War, including nuclear. The U.N. dismantled an atomic weapons program that they would not known was there had the war never occurred. This was the second program Iraq undertook after Israel wrecked the first one.

The history of Iraq has been of a regime that wants to possess WMD and has taken every opportunity to develop them. That in and of itself is not enough to warrant removal of a regime. Britain also possesses WMD. But Iraq has used WMD on both its own people and in attacks on other nations, having shown itself to be aggressive against its neighbors. Finally, Iraq had links with various terrorist movements, certainly in the Mideast, and possibly elsewhere. While this does not implicate Iraq in 9/11, it does present a clear source of danger if Iraq possessed WMD.

If I say there are yetis in the woods, even though nobody has seen them recently, it makes some difference if a few years ago everyone had seen and photographed yetis swinging from the trees in those same woods.

This timeline is a useful reference of how Iraq operates as far as ambition and concealment goes. Please note the constant cycle of Iraqi lies and later disclosures under U.N. pressure all through the 1990s. Please note the constant attempts to interfere with the inspection process and conceal evidence.

This DOD briefing is also informative on this subject. Don't forget to check out the slides.

It has been said here that none of this proves Iraq had either WMD or the means of producing them immediately prior to the recent war. That somehow, all of the previous ambitions and concealment went away, that the previous programs were irrelevant, and Saddam became as pure as the driven snow, and would have never done anything else in this area had we simply left him alone. This is akin to looking at a house and saying it's painted white only on this side. After all, unless you see the other side, you have no solid proof it isn't painted purple over there. I say we need a little common sense in this argument.

It is being implied that Bush is somehow solely responsible for misreading a flow of intelligence--not all from the CIA--across the planet that caused other nations and the U.N. to come to similar conclusions about the possible existence of such weapons or programs, if not to the same conclusions about how to handle it.

Keep in mind that many other people before the war came to exactly the same conclusions as Bush did given the same evidence, including a Congress that examined the evidence available and voted for action in Iraq. If Bush is a dupe, he has a lot of company.

That somehow the lack of a weapons purchase in Niger, or to be precise, the forgery of a single source of data on that subject, invalidates the entire perception of Iraq as a danger to the world.

Somehow, this all is supposed to be more plausible than the simple idea that the weapons and/or their production facilities were effectively concealed, removed, or destroyed in the extensive period of time between the time an attack on Iraq became a near-certainty, and the time it was carried out.