In article , David Nebenzahl wrote:
On 8/25/2009 11:28 AM Doug Miller spake thus:

In article , David Nebenzahl
wrote:

On 8/25/2009 10:09 AM Stormin Mormon spake thus:

That, and tank, so I've heard. And we found no [Iraqi]* WMD, of
course.

That's not true.

That's because there were none.

That's not true either.

There weren't anywhere nearly as many as we expected, but the amount is
non-zero.

Well, fair enough: some clarification is called for here. From one of
the articles you posted links to
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jan/11/iraq):

However, the find of a small amount of mortar shells is unlikely to
satisfy a growing chorus of criticism that the much-touted weapons of
mass destruction either never existed or were destroyed years ago. The
Danish team has found only 36 mortar rounds buried in desert about 45
miles from Al Amarah, a southern town. But it added that up to a 100
more could still be hidden at the location. The rounds were in plastic
bags and some were leaking. It seems they had been buried for at least
10 years.

So the salient point here is that those munitions were clearly left over
from the Iran-Iraq war.

Far from being salient, that's totally irrelevant. The important point was
that the cease-fire agreement that suspended hostilities in 1991 required
Iraq to account for, and dispose of under UN supervision, *all* such munitions
in its possession, without regard to when they were produced, what they were
left over from, or any other condition -- and that didn't happen.

(Pointed question: please tell us who, exactly,
supplied Saddam Hussein with his chemical weapons for that war?)

Germany, mostly.

And of
course, there's no argument that Hussein did use WMDs indiscriminately
against the Iranians during that war.

There were essentially zero weapons of mass destruction found that were
kept for use against invading US (er, "coalition") troops.

Yes, I'd agree with that statement. That's not what was widely believed at the
time, though: see http://www.davidstuff.com/political/wmdquotes.htm for an
example of the prevailing sentiment among U.S. political leaders.

Glad we cleared that up.

Me too.

In hindsight, it appears that nearly all of Iraq's vaunted WMD capacity was a
massive bluff by Saddam, to make himself and Iraq appear more powerful and
dangerous than they really were -- most likely, IMHO, primarily to discourage
Iran and perhaps Syria from taking advantage of the weakened condition Iraq
was left in after Desert Storm, and secondarily to impress his own citizens
with the power of the Iraqi state in order to discourage *them* from taking
similar advantage.