Excuse me Ed, but Mr. Bush, Mr. Powell, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney repeatedly justified going to war on the basis of claims that Iraq possessed large stockpiles of WMDs. They claimed the UN inspections weren't working and that Mr. Hussein's alleged non-compliance with UN resolutions was justification for going to war.

Before the war, you and I argued consistently about the evidence (or lack thereof) of Iraqi WMDs. You claimed we had to go to war to rid Saddam of these now-mythical weapons. You agreed with the administration's claims that these weapons represented a threat to Americans. It was upon the basis of this threat that Mr. Bush justified an unprecented pre-emptive war.

As the war proceeded, you continued to claim that we would find these WMDs. That it was only a matter of time. With every new potential discovery, you trumpeted that these WMDs had been found - only to be contradicted by the facts. You rudely demeaned and devalued anyone here who suggested that perhaps the administration was wrong about their claims.

But now you are saying that none of that mattered - now that we know for certain these WMDs didn't exist.

The only one lying around here is you Ed.

From the very beginning I stated that the evidence for Iraqi WMDs was weak, if not non-existent. I argued that given this there was no need to rush to war - that we had time to let the UN inspections proceed, and to use diplomacy to assemble UN support for whatever police action might be necessary should those inspections fail.

TUrns out I was right. There were no Iraqi WMDs. Mr. Bush's main reason to engage in a pre-emptive war was not true.

Now, you'll notice that I've never criticized the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, our military intervention there was just and justified. That country provided clear and unequivocal support to islamic fundamentalists who murdered nearly three thousand American citizens. There was real cause to go to war. This is not the case with Iraq.