Loftus: Evidence Points to Iraq WMDs

Intelligence expert John Loftus has a startling piece at FrontPage Magazine today on the mountain of Iraqi documents still being reviewed (only about 10% of what's been obtained has actually been read, so far). Loftus is a former Army officer and DOJ prosecutor.

While his intro says that both those who say there were no WMDs in Iraq, and those who say there were, are both a little right and a little wrong, once you've read through the evidence, I believe the reasonable person can only conclude one thing.

Here is his short-and-sweet lowdown on what happened to the WMD programs in Iraq:

The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990's. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam’s entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans’ noses.

The entire piece, though lengthy, is very much worth reading all the way through. What we already know is stunning, given how hard the Left and their stooges in the "mainstream" media have worked to pooh-pooh Iraq's WMD programs. What more will come out as we eventually get through all the documents found in Iraq?

Loftus' conclusion:

In view of these newly discovered documents, it can be concluded, more probably than not, that Saddam did have a nuclear weapons program in 2001-2002, and that it is reasonably certain that he would have continued his efforts towards making a nuclear bomb in 2003 had he not been stopped by the Coalition forces. Four years after the war began, we still do not have all the answers, but we have many of them. Ninety percent of the Saddam files have never been read, let alone translated. It is time to utterly reject the conventional wisdom that there were no WMD in Iraq and look to the best evidence: Saddam’s own files on WMD. The truth is what it is, the documents speak for themselves.

WMD programs were only one of many justifications for the Iraq invasion (others: violations of numerous UN resolutions, Saddam's documented support of terrorism, hundreds of firings on U.S. and British warplanes). There have been several finds pointing to WMDs in Iraq since 2003 (chemicals in the Euphrates River, chemical warheads, etc.), but the evidence pointing toward a dangerous and active WMD program in Iraq just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

President Bush was right to eliminate this threat to the Middle East, the United States, and the rest of the world. It's a pity the American Left would rather score political points than get onboard with removing threats to national security.