The claim was "extraordinary" only if you pay absolutely no attention to Saddam's actions and goals for the last twenty years.

The way you talk, you'd think we'd accused Switzerland of being a threat to us and its neighbors.

Saddam had built weapons of mass destruction, stockpiled them in huge quantities, and used them on both his own people and neighboring nations. He was actively pursuing them in all fields, including and intensive nuclear weapons program, prior to the Gulf War.

If you are accusing somebody of a crime, and describing that accusation as "extraordinary," it makes one hell of a lot of difference if that person has actually committed that crime many times in the past.

And lest we forget (yet again), the objective of the U.N. mandates against Saddam was not that the world had to prove he had the weapons, but that Saddam had to prove he didn't. He fought the inspections every inch of the way, as I have documented a number of times from U.N. records, and in dozens of ways acted exactly like someone concealing something.