and further, I remain unconvinced that Hussein hasn't, in fact, effectively hidden and/or cast off the WMDs he had, and which remain to be found. He has a history of this -- during Gulf War I he hid a chunk of his air force in Iran, which had then until only recently been his mortal enemy. And this time around he had even more willing allies to give him a hand in the WMD shellgame, not just the Iranians, but the Syrians, Russians, French and possibly the Chinese as well. And the Baath party thugs who've managed to evade capture have done a more than adequate job of killing and/or intimidating the scientists (and their families) who were involved with the Iraqi weapons program from spilling the beans on where the weapons are, or what became of them. For my money, they're in Syria and, probably, Russia.

In short, simply because the WMDs haven't yet been found, it does not logically follow that it was all a "LIE" on the part of GWB (and for that matter, Clinton, Blair, Allbright, GHWB, Gore, Berger, Baker, Rice, Powell, the Kuwaitis, or the Iranians... and the list goes on) to claim emphatically that those weapons existed until recently.

I'm not a big fan of the war in Iraq -- not because Hussein didn't deserve toppling -- he DID -- but rather because the bog down has left us more vulverable to the even greater threats that both the Chinese and CRAZY North Koreans present to us. But that's what we get for trying to fight a war with the overarching milktoast philosophy of "political correctness" and "winning hearts and minds" of sworn enemies (and a fundementally anti-Western culture), rather than defeating them thunderously, soundly and by bringing them to their knees begging for mercy.

We needed modern-day Shermans and Pattons to end this thing, not PC and kumbaya.