WMDs? What WMDs? (Insider Report).

President Bush insisted during a March 6th press conference that the war on Iraq would be fought to confront "the threat posed to our nation and to peace by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of terror." The peril posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, insisted the president on that occasion, was so grave and immediate that our national survival required that we go to war: "I will not leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons."

In an April 6th interview with the Washington Post, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz argued that the principal reason for war with Iraq "was the direct threat the Iraqi leader posed to U.S. national security through his possession of weapons of mass destruction." That interview took place as U.S. and allied troops were closing in on Baghdad. The death throes of the Iraq regime presented tremendous risk to our forces if Saddam actually possessed WMDs, given that the dying regime would have nothing to lose if it chose to unleash those weapons. Thankfully, this did not happen.

As coalition troops seized control of the Iraqi capital and other major cities, the public was treated to footage of joyful Iraqis tearing down Saddam's statute--and other Iraqis gleefully pillaging shops, stores, and the Iraqi National Museum. But, as of this writing, coalition troops have yet to turn up the elusive WMDs. Amid saturation coverage of Baghdad's liberation, the principal reason for the war--Saddam's alleged possession of WMDs--was all but forgotten.

During an April 9th Pentagon press conference, a reporter asked Defense Secretary Rumsfeld how important it was that U.S.-led forces find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which provided "the rationale for the war." The normally straight-speaking Rumsfeld offered an artfully opaque reply in which he speculated the WMDs might have been moved out of the country and concluded: "I don't get the thrust of the question."