The way I see it, this is neither critical new information, nor that surprising, considering that according to the report Saddam expended about a hundred thousand of these things during the Iran Iraq war.

This is why it's important to know if these were just found laying around, which would be astonishing if they weren't, or found stored or deliberately hidden (expired or not).

For me, the issue has always been a dictator that had built WMD, had deployed them in attacks, had rebuilt secret programs that had once been destroyed, and had a long history of concealing his programs from inspection.

Saddam started a nuclear weapons program that was destroyed by the Israelis (to near-universal condemnation), then he started a second one that was totally hidden from the U.N. until the first Gulf War forced it out. If we had not fought the first Gulf War, Saddam would have had nuclear weapons a decade ago.

It was perfectly reasonable to assume Saddam was lying to inspectors. I have seen long documents about deliberate concealment of many different things from inspectors, both during the early and latter stages.

Duelfer's report concluded that Saddam was only waiting for the opportunity and the removal of sanctions to restart his work. You hear "sanctions were working" from the Left now, but back before the Ministry of Truth got hold of it, sanctions were considered by the same people to be a massive human rights issue, blamed for thousands of Iraqi deaths a month. The pressure to remove them was huge.

It should be remembered that the only reason we KNOW as much as we do about the extent of Saddam's weapons programs now is because we occupied the whole damn country. Otherwise, Saddam would now be playing the same "rope-a-dope" on the U.N. that Iran is.