No WMDs in Iraq

So, the news is finally out. As a PR guy who is more involved in bad and controversial news than good news, I have to wonder why it took so long.

The Bush Administration endured howls and jibes for months after the invasion for good reason. It had to search a country the size of California to see if their intelligence was correct. But ever since the Duelfer Report came out, it's been clear no weapons would be found, and yet the White House stayed on the hunt.

Doing so discredited the Duelfer report in a way, and it did nothing to enhance the reputation of the administration, which has very high negatives on the "flexibility" issue. The day the Duelfer Report was made public, Bush should have said that based on the findings, he was instructing the Pentagon to reassign the WMD search teams. Such an announcement would have given him an exceptional opportunity to refocus attention on what would have happened without the war -- Saddam's eventual use of oil-for-food profiteering to gear up a larger weapons program.

One could suppose that the search teams were gathering intelligence that made it worthwhile to keep up the charade, but that doesn't hold. Better intelligence could be gathered if everyone thought the search was over, but a few people kept up their work.

As a result, MSM are particularly gleeful in their editorials today, and particularly obtuse. Take this, from the NYTimes lead editorial:

The fact that nothing was found does not absolutely, positively prove that there wasn't something there once, something that was disassembled and trucked over the border to Syria or buried in yet another Iraqi rose garden. But it's not the sort of possibility you'd want to fight a war over. What all our loss and pain and expense in the Iraqi invasion has actually proved is that the weapons inspections worked, that international sanctions - deeply, deeply messy as they turned out to be - worked, and that in the case of Saddam Hussein, the United Nations worked. Whatever the Hussein regime once had is gone because the international community insisted. It was all destroyed a decade ago, under world pressure.

The United Nations worked? How exactly? By mismanagement, bribery and corruption, the United Nations was funding Saddam's future weapons plan. Yes, the old weapons were destroyed after we led the first Gulf War, and after we insisted against huge opposition on severe sanctions. The UN came reluctantly along, ran a pretty good weapons inspection program and a really lousy oil-for-food program.

The NYTimes doesn't ask what would have happened without the war. It doesn't consider Libya, Syria and Iran. It doesn't consider a Saddam still in power. It ignores discussing what the insurgent terrorists in Iraq would be doing elsewhere if they weren't fighting us there. But even the NYTimes understand the stakes -- something that Ted Kennedy and Howard Dean seem to have missed:

The 1,200 military men and women who were assigned to his search team are now fighting Iraqi insurgents. We hope they succeed. If they do not, large swaths of Iraq could become a no man's land, where terrorists will be free to work on W.M.D. projects and United Nations weapons inspectors cannot go to thwart them.

Here we all must agree with the NYTimes editorial page and hope and pray that our troops succeed. One remaining difference: We believe they will, and the NYTimes probably is still not convinced.