The point is that you would know none of this at all if Saddam were still in power and the U.N. was still doing inspections. Not the interviews with scientists. Not Amin's letter. Not the documentation. None of it. And obviously, without U.S. military intervention, both in the Gulf War and now, Iraq would have enthusiastically continued to pursue its ambitions of developing such weapons. Hell, without the Gulf War, they WOULD have nuclear weapons by now.

There is no possible way one could read that article and say "inspections were working."

A massive program of deceit and concealment, total disregard of the U.N. restrictions and resolutions, and a pattern of behavior that showed both intent and capability to develop and use WMD apparently mean nothing to you. No atom bombs were found lined up in a row, so we should have left Saddam alone to play hide-and-seek with the idiotic U.N. inspectors.

Saddam had a whole load of scientists and engineers whose job it was to develop weapons of mass destruction. This is a fact. I don't see how it is important, when judging the danger, that we find out after the fact that they weren't doing a very good job of it.

Again, we see my "Emperor's New Clothes" theory coming out. The point of this too seems to escape you. Given information pouring out of Iraq indicating WMD development, falsified by Iraqi scientists and government agents or not, Bush's decision is justified. If a criminal is shot by the police for holding a gun to a hostage, a criminal that has taken hostages and shot them dead in the past, it is completely irrelevant if the gun is later found to have been unloaded.

The Iraq attempt to buy long-range missile hardware and manufacturing technology from North Korea--just before the current war--apparently doesn't bother you either, because it didn't work. This time. Just like the SCUDs being shipped from North Korea didn't seem to bother anyone. It obviously wasn't important enough to mention in this article, but then that's not just paper any more, is it?