Everyone believed it

Jeff Jacoby has a column today titled “A just war, with or without WMD” with this passage:

Even Saddam's own military officers believed there were stockpiles of illegal weapons. In its Page 1 story on Kay's findings, The New York Times noted that while "no Special Republican Guard units had chemical or biological weapons . . . all of the officers believed that some other Special Republican Guard unit had chemical weapons. `They all said they didn't have it, but they thought other units had it,' Dr. Kay said." For those of us who never believed that the case for toppling Saddam depended primarily on his possession of unconventional weapons, the fact that he no longer possessed them changes very little. The war was right and proper because Saddam was a homicidal dictator who ruled with staggering brutality, because he provided support to international terrorists, and because Ba'athist Iraq was a threat to its neighbors.

Make no mistake: this is still an intelligence failure. But, honestly, if everybody in Iraq believed there were weapons programs – just that somebody else was working on them – this is the kind of chatter the CIA depends on to make a conclusion. Plus, there’s the fact that Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds and nobody believed he would willfully give up his stockpiles.