"I have a hard time believing that because there was no evidence on the ground and no willingness to wait for proof, and I thought no reason not to wait - we were already in there inspecting most everything."

Donald - I'm going to be brief, since Craig addressed your post in length. I just wanted to request that you do some research into the 10 year period during which UNSCUM was supposed to be doing it's inspections. If you look at all of the UN resolutions during that time, they were consistently issuing resolution after resolution demanding that Hussein comply with their resolutions and provide unfettered access to all sites civilian/industrial/military/presidential. It's when you look back at the details that you find the root of the problem. Hussein was completely controlling where and when UNSCUM was allowed to search. When he wasn't doing this, he was periodically kicking them out of the country. So, the reality is that the UN inspectors were being lead back and forth across Iraq looking only at what Hussein would allow them to view.

Now, once you come to understand this, you have to then reexamine the fact that the UN clearly determined that Iraq had WMDs in many forms at the end of the first gulf war. Now, it's 10 years later and everyone is saying that there are no WMDs. For this to be true, either of two things would have had to happened:

1. Hussein destoyed them
2. Hussein hid them

Which one seems more logical? If he destroyed them, would he not have provided proof to the UN to avoid the second war? That's all he would have needed to do to get the UN off his back. Therefore, if you rule out the first option, what's left is that they are hidden somewhere, either somewhere in the sand or in a neighboring country like Syria.

The problem with everyone is that they get selective memory about the fact that there was no doubt that Hussein had them. Hell, he used them on the kurds. No one really wants to dig into the above argument because it would force them to agree with us evil conservative in our assessment that they are simply hidden somewhere.

Now...maybe that wasn't so brief. Then again, it was shorter than some of my other posts.