Response to this frustrated report ought to be interesting:

David Kay, who stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said on Friday he does not believe there were any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.

"I don't think they existed," Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s," he said.

Conspiracy theorists and partisan Democrats, your boat has come in. Now we know the truth: when United Nations inspectors had been shooed out of country, Saddam took it upon himself to destroy stockpiles, many of which never existed, then refused to show any evidence of it so as to keep sanctions, no-fly zones and international suspicion in place - particularly to prevent a return to Iraq's early-1980s prosperity! His greatest triumph was losing power to President Bush's renewed pursuit of Security Council resolutions. What guile! But only after Clinton lied, of course.

Sorry, but the vice president - as usual - makes the most sense. And lest we fall for the notion that this was "cooked up in Crawford, Texas," consider this. [For the record, if I have to choose between the disgusting tyrants of the Sudan and Bill Clinton for the answer to the alleged bombing of an aspirin factory, it's Clinton every time.]

'MY BAD': In the event you're being seduced by the trend of shrugging your shoulders and blaming intelligence, Scrappleface can set you straight.

HITCH: More perspective from the uber-objectivist:

There was no comparable inquisition, as I recall, when the intelligence "community" failed to predict, and very nearly failed to report, the invasion of Kuwait. And the antiwar forces cling to their taunt on WMD because every other part of their propaganda and prediction has been utterly exploded.

...[I] was not an elected officeholder in a democratic government in a post-9/11 atmosphere. If I had been, I would certainly have decided to make the worst assumption about any report on Saddam's capacity for lethality, and I would have been operating at all times on the presumption of guilt. As a civilian, I would have wanted to criticize any Western government that did not err deliberately on this side.

Or failed to realize that, by demolishing Saddam's regime on that account, the free world appeared very serious about game-playing to one Moammar Ghadafi. Do the opponents of Iraq's liberation believe authoritarians, by their very nature liars, should be given the benefit of the doubt?