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The UN documented the Iraqi WMD in the mid and late 1990’s:
Saddam had [WMD] and used it in the late 1980s (Halabja and Iran) and early 1990s (southern Iraq after the aborted Shi’ite uprising). It was there in the mid-1990s; UN inspectors found it. It was there in the late 1990s; UN inspectors said so.
Yet the left claimed they no longer existed at the time the Iraq war started, and made that the centerpiece of their argument against the war.
The left never tried to explain what happened to the Iraqi WMD that the UN had found and documented, but instead irresponsibly jumped to the conclusion that those WMD had not been hidden; that they had not been given away; but that they had been destroyed by Hussein in compliance with UN resolutions.
That assertion was not only groundless; it is now denied by the UN itself.
On June 9, Demetrius Perricos announced that before, during and after the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction and medium-range ballistic missiles to countries in Europe and the Middle East. Entire factories were dismantled and shipped as scrap metal to Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey, among others, at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. As an example of speed by which these facilities were dismantled, Perricos displayed two photographs of a ballistic missile site near Baghdad, one taken in May 2003 with an active facility, the other in February 2004 that showed it had simply disappeared.
What passed for scrap metal and has since been discovered as otherwise is amazing. Inspectors have found Iraqi SA-2 surface-to-air missiles in Rotterdam—complete with U.N. inspection tags—and 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with components for solid-fuel for missiles. Short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missiles were shipped abroad by agents of the regime. That missing ballistic missile site contained missile components, a reactor vessel and fermenters—the latter used for the production of chemical and biological warheads.
...Perricos isn’t an American shill defending the Bush administration, but rather the acting executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and his report was made to the Security Council.
...The implications of the United Nations’ discovery of how Hussein’s regime got rid of many of its banned weapons programs is staggering, especially considering that it happened partly under the watch of U.N. weapons inspectors.
No Iraqi WMD? Be serious.
(Hat tip: Andrew Breitbart)
If you made this up people wouldn’t believe it.
In Massachusetts Republicans are calling for Kerry to resign from the Senate because he’s not fulfilling the requirements of the job:
Of the 112 Senate votes this year, Kerry has voted just 14 times, according to an Associated Press tally.
Kerry’s response? He’s missing all these Senate votes because he wants responsible leadership.
Asked about the GOP calls, Kerry dismissed the suggestions, telling reporters as his plane landed in Kentucky, “I’m running for president because we have to put this country back into a place of responsible leadership. And I believe that I’m serving the citizens of Massachusetts and the country in the proposals that I’ve laid out.”
This guy just loves to say things that contradict each other. He skips out on his current job because he wants to be responsible in some other job we haven’t given him yet.
In 2000, Joe Lieberman ran simultaneously for the Senate and as the Democratic VP candidate. But I never heard that he had missed over 85% of the Senate votes at that time.
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