But there are many plausible explanations for why we haven't yet found the answers we seek. 1) Saddam is not certifiably dead. Until such time as his corpse is produced, many Iraqis who know the details of these banned weapons programs may be reluctant to talk out of continuing fear of retribution. Don't Saddam's remaining thugs retain the ability to pick off U.S. servicemen? 2) Iraq had years to hide the weapons from U.N. inspectors and many months of notice of impending U.S. action. As we slow-walked to war, Saddam may have hidden the weapons (which are not large) anywhere in that capacious country. 3) The weapons may have been destroyed when the war began. There were traces of chemical agents in the Euphrates River, and the biological weapons vans U.S. forces discovered had been scrubbed clean with disinfectant. Further, we intercepted communications among Iraqi officers ordering that the banned weapons be disposed of.
The interpretation liberals are placing on this though is literally incredible. They leap to the conclusion that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair intentionally deceived the world. They knew the WMD threat was nonexistent and brazenly lied in order to drag their deluded publics into a war they wanted for other reasons.
What other reasons? Is this a watered-down "blood for oil" argument? And if Bush and Blair were telling lies about these weapons, then so were the intelligence services of France, Germany and Russia, as well as the U.N. Security Council. Further, if Bush and Blair were capable of such a colossal lie, why weren't they capable of planting the evidence?
Besides, there are many aspects of this war's history that did not turn out as predicted, and most of those surprises reflect poorly on antiwar, not pro-war, predictions. There were no massive civilian casualties, no severe damage to Iraq's infrastructure, no refugees, no rising Arab street, no increase in terror attacks at home, no involvement of Israel, no lengthy "quagmire" and very few American casualties.
The fate of those WMDs is an unfolding drama. But to believe they never existed is to flout all of the available facts.