WMDs Found!

That's right, in IRAQ!!

From the "Fair and Balanced" report:

We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

I figured after three years, we just gave up looking for them.

Hey, wait a minute - did Santorum say "pre-Gulf War"?


The weapons are thought to be manufactured before 1991 so they would not be proof of an ongoing WMD program in the 1990s. But they do show that Saddam Hussein was lying when he said all weapons had been destroyed, and it shows that years of on-again, off-again weapons inspections did not uncover these munitions.


I guess the second sentence of that paragraph is supposed to mitigate the first one. Funny, I don't remember "punishing Saddam for lying" as one of the hawks' rationales leading up to our invasion.


Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the report, completed in April but only declassified now, shows that "there is still a lot about Iraq that we don't fully understand."


Well put, Pete.

Asked why the Bush administration, if it had known about the information since April or earlier, didn't advertise it, Hoekstra conjectured that the president has been forward-looking and concentrating on the development of a secure government in Iraq.

This reminds me of Bush's infamous comment on 13 March 2002, when he said of Osama bin Laden, "I truly am not that concerned about him", describing him as "a person who has now been marginalized." When confronted with the glaring failure to achieve the stated objective, the administration strategy is just to brush it off, because that's all in the past now. Whatever happened to accountability?

Of course, this is not just some isolated event. The Pentagon is giving members of Congress a 74-page briefing book about how to spin the War in Iraq to their constituents, and Santorum and Hoekstra are just the first GOP drones to pull it out in front of news cameras.

The vociferous opposition to Kerry's withdrawal timetable proposal - accusing Democrats of "retreat and defeatism" - makes me wonder just how war supporters think we're finally going to leave Iraq. If timetables are the tools of cowards and hypocrites, how do you do it? Spontaneously, overnight, after The Decider decrees that the Mission has been Accomplished?