Mystery of the Missing WMDs

EVEN IF WE ACCEPT that Saddam tricked [the UN inspectors], two successive U.S. administrations, indeed, pretty much the entire world, into believing that he retained dangerous proscribed weapons when they no longer existed, this still leaves a major problem. It fails to explain the first four years after the 1991 war -- when Iraq did the exact opposite, working to convince the world that its banned weapons programs had been destroyed and nearly succeeding in doing so.

Writing in The American Spectator, Laurie Mylroie says George Piro, a personable and handsome FBI agent, appeared on 60 Minutes Sunday to tell us Saddam Hussein's secrets. The 36-year-old Lebanese-American was Saddam's interrogator. In addition to whatever the show disclosed about Saddam, it also revealed a lot about how the U.S. media and bureaucracies have handled and stoked the controversies over Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) -- basically, afflicted by chronic Alzheimer's. The events relevant to understanding OIF go back nearly 18 years -- to Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Few people worked on Iraq all those years. Still, those doing so now ought to know that history. Neither 60 Minutes nor the FBI do.

Sometime in the future, when Operation Iraqi Freedom is no longer a political football, Americans will likely learn that Saddam was indeed a major threat and that he was not idle in the 12 years between the end of the 1991 war and the start of the second war.

Read it.