Continual references to inspections and reports seem encouraging... but it's curious that none of the screaming leftist fanatics in this thread actually reference any of them. A look at those actual reports gives some interesting illumination as to why they didn't.
Hans Blix was an agent of the United Nations, an organization known for beeing misled, foxed, and generally made fools of by dictators around the world while failing in its mission to reduce or eliminate international strife and threat. His report (
http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/SC7asdelivered.htm), which the screamers insist says that Iraq had no WMD, in fact says nothing of the sort. It points out that Iraq had resisted inspections for years, kicked out the inspectors, and generally gotten in their way as much as possible. Only in the last month did they "begin cooperating", and at that point inspectors found many examples of chemical-warfare shells, fragments, and delivery systems. The report goes on to say that suddenly (after months of buildup of coalition forces and only weeks before the actual invasion) they began furnishing information about people who dealt with those illegal items, though actual records were "missing". Basically the report said that Iraq DID have some WMDs, even after years of evading inspections, moving them to other countries, and burying evidence in people's back yards; and that with the invasion ready to kick off any day, they were finally starting to admit it and destroy a few of the systems that they had insisted for years didn't exist.
Unsurprisingly, the leftist hysterics in this country immediately started bleating that this somehow "proved" the Iraqi government was innocent of all charges. Considering their manifest sympathies lay, this was as inevitable as it was fatuous.
Keep in mind, too, that WMDs were not the reason we invaded Iraq - a fact the leftist hysterics aren't eager to be reminded of. Saddam had invaded a peaceful neighbor, Kuwait, and Gulf War I was fought to throw him out. George H.W. Bush and the other allies deliberately stopped short of invading Iraq then, despite the demonstrated warlike nature of the Saddam regime, and offered Saddam the option of staying alive and in power, if he would consent to abandoning his desires to takewover his neighbors, stop certain warmaking activities, quit making and storing the WMDs he had used on his own citizens, allow inspections of his military capabilities, and several other conditions. Having had his army blown to smithereens in less than a baseball season, Saddam agreed that these conditions were prefereable to having his head impaled on a spike at the gates of Baghdad.
As soon as coalition forces withdrew, Saddam immediately started violating the agreements he had used to get rid of them, eventually trashing every last one of them. The Clinton administration, instead of completing the invasion as they should have and putting their "regime change" policy into effect, went through a farce of "negotiations" with the government that was violating previously-agreed negotiations right and left. When the GWB administration was elected, they pointed out that such negotiations with someone like Saddam were pointless without the force to back them up. Then 9/11 happened, showing the western world what happened to people who tried to negotiate with terrorists, or ignore them as the Clinton administration mostly did. After years of fruitless negotiations with nations that actively supported terrorists, and attacks on nation after nation by those terrorists, the GWB administration decided on a course of demanding a stoppage of terrorist support from those governments, and forcible dismantling of governments who refused. Afghanistan was knocked off first since they had supported and harbored 9/11's mastermind. Iraq got the next round of negotiations, for a year and a half since they actively supported terrorists throughout the mideast and showed no signs of wanting to stop. Troop buildups began to add teeth to the negotiations, with the allies constantly offering peace if Saddam would comply. He constantly defied all entreaties, until just a month before our forces were ready to invade; then only to suddenly decide that cooperation was a good idea after all. Eventhen he continued to resist most efforts to bring him into compliance.
With the track record of invasions, WMD use, defiance of cease-fire terms, etc. that Saddam had compiled, the allies finally added a demand that Saddam step down. Various liberals at that point were making silly statments that we had "rushed" to war, as though 12 years of negotiations, allowances, backtracking etc. even faintly resembled that.
Pretending we went to war because of WMDs, is like saying the Civil War had started because Southern slaveowners had whipped some of their slaves. In fact, it's only one of many diverse reasons, all of which were overwhelmingly legitimate.
Leftist screams about "cherry-picking evidence" are even sillier. For years, both the Clinton and GWB administrations had received iterally hundreds of reports about Iraq violating cease-fire agreement after cease-fire agreement, brutally supressing their own populations, building up their armed forces, etc., after invading other countries right and left. Toward the very end, with Saddam staring into the teeth of a huge invasion force just outside his border, they finally started "cooperating", and a few reports suggested that despite his gross violations of most agreements, the scale of his WMD efforts may have been smaller that expected... even as more reports still confirmed large size for this aspect of his violations.
Bush decided that the hundred of reports were right and the two or three were wrong, and acted accordingly, as anyone with sense would have to do. And here we have the leftist hysterics screaming that this was "cherry picking", as though both kinds of reports could have been right... even as they insist they themselves "cherry-pick" the other way, mouthing incomprehensively that the hundreds were wrong while the two or three reports they liked, were right; screeching that it was Biush who somehow "lied" while they themselves did not, etc. etc.. Their rage and mouth-foaming desire to "get" George Bush, completely blind them to the hilarious impossibility of their desired "position".
And these are the people who say THEY should be the ones running our country.
