William F. Buckley isn't fickle about demolishing the case against President Bush on account of the Iraqi Survey Group (emphasis mine):

We have learned through Duelfer that Saddam Hussein was a super-confident scofflaw, perhaps the richest in history. Iraq’s oil production had been between 3 and 3.5 million barrels per day. When the trading ban was activated, in 1990, oil sales were cut off. But quickly there was a hue and cry that the primary victims of the embargo were Iraqi civilians. Along came the Oil for Food program, which allowed the sale of 2.1 million barrels per day of Iraqi oil as a means of generating income to feed those civilians.

We are talking about a great deal of money. Two-plus million barrels per day yields 766 million barrels per year. If the oil was fetching a measly $15 per barrel, we are talking about $11,490 billion. We know now that a great scandal was born.

...[Saddam's] attitude toward the embargo was lordly in its arrogance. He reassured military leaders at a meeting in January, 2000, that he would have no trouble at all getting the matèriel he wanted: “We have said with certainty that the embargo will not be lifted by a Security Council resolution, but will corrode by itself.”

Was he ever right on that point. The Duelfer report is extremely informative in tracking down foreign agencies that violated the embargo and shipped sophisticated military equipment to Saddam. It quotes an Iraqi memo stating that the deputy general manager of the French company Sofema, a military component marketer, would be bringing to Baghdad a company catalog so that Iraqi officials could “discuss your needs with him.”

...And a lot of countries whose merchants violated the U.N. embargo are angry with the United States for proceeding to war against a country whose threat against others could only have been realized by successful defiance of the U.N. embargo.

The whole article deserves a read. As USNews' Michael Barone continues, Saddam's threat in hindsight takes on a different form, but one no less serious; only more insidious. President Bush has been magnanimous long enough. While his sideways charge that Saddam "[tried] to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions" was a decent enough start, the gravity of this betrayal can't be allowed to come and go without full disclosure to the American people. John Kerry probably expects to tar and feather the president before running him out of the town hall tonight. Bush, on the other hand, has a chance to prove once and for all that his opponent is a dangerous, posturing fool who would keep enemies closer than friends for all the wrong reasons.

STRANGER THAN FICTION: Stephen Hayes thinks the same.