---

The politics of war

By Steve Gilliard

The Bush Administration is hoping that finding Saddam and WMD will solve their problems.

Their problems will not be solved.

There are no WMD to find, at least any in usable form. In months of searching, we have come up with two hydrogen producing trailers and a rusty centrifuge. No 122mm shells, no rockets, no drums of chemicals, nothing to indicate any sort of chemical weapons, much less the infrastructure to support it. The structure to support biological weapons is even more fanciful.

There are still pipe dreams that they were buried or shipped to a neighboring country, but in reality, there is no evidence to contradict the IAEA and UNMOVIC's basic contention that Iraq's WMD program was, at best, dormant and fragmentary, with no active development continuing.

What is not usually said in the wider press is that a WMD program requires a complex series of facilities and caretakers to be effective. ...