One thing IS for certain, we don't have Iraq working on WMDs today.

As for doing nothing, we do nothing when it comes to lots of dictators.  Like the House of Saud, for example.  And how about, you know, lifting or easing the sactions since

The original stated purposes of the sanctions were to compel Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, to pay reparations, and to disclose and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction.

On the other hand Obama has kept the wars going, GITMO open and now has launched the drones with very few complaints.

The difference is simple.

Obama - Democrat

Fershtay?

Nope.

Did the Russians?  Nope.

Vladimir Putin yesterday rejected Anglo-American claims that Saddam Hussein already possesses weapons of mass destruction and told Tony Blair that the best way to resolve the conflict of evidence is not war, but the return of UN inspectors to Iraq...

"Fears are one thing, hard facts are another"...

"Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the US Congress."

What about the French and Germans?

Nope.

France, Germany and Russia have released an unprecedented joint declaration on the Iraq crisis, demanding more weapons inspectors and more technical assistance for them....

Nothing today justifies a war," Mr Chirac told a joint news conference with Mr Putin. "This region really does not need another war."

President Putin says world opinion is on his side
He said France did not have "undisputed proof" that Iraq still held weapons of mass destruction.

That was only 1 month before the invasion.

What about the most important agency of all - the one actually doing the weapons inspections in Iraq - the IAEA?

The International Atomic Energy Agency declared in 1998 that Iraq's nuclear program had been completely dismantled. The UN Special Commission on Iraq estimated then that at least 95 percent of Iraq's chemical weapons program had been similarly accounted for and destroyed. Iraq's potential to develop biological weapons is a much bigger question mark, since such a program is much easier to hide. However, UNSCOM noted in 1998 that virtually all of Iraq's offensive missiles and other delivery systems had been accounted for and rendered inoperable.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA (2003) - "We have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapon program since the elimination of the program in the 1990's." He also "put the kibosh" on the administration's charge that Iraq was seeking aluminum tubes for nuclear weapon development. Eleven days before the invasion, he repeated his assertion that there was absolutely no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program.

Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix (2003) -  "The commission has not at any time during the inspections in Iraq found evidence of the continuation or resumption of programs of weapons of mass destruction or significant quantities of proscribed items, whether from pre-1991 or later."

Scott Ritter - chief weapons inspector in Iraq in 1991 and 1998: "[W]e knew that while we couldn't account for everything that the Iraqis said they had destroyed, we could only account for 90 to 95 percent, we knew that: (a) we had no evidence of a retained capability and, (b) no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting. And furthermore, the C.I.A. knew this. The British intelligence knew this; Israeli intelligence knew this; German intelligence. The whole world knew this."

So, no - in fact, "everyone" did not "know" this.  Everyone did not agree, particularly those in the best position to make a determination.  The Bush administration hyped every bit of evidence it could use to claim that Iraq had WMDs, and ignored all evidence to the contrary.  You were sold a bill of goods, and you willingly bought it because you wanted to believe it.

From among the most outspoken of critics of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, China has emerged as one of the biggest economic beneficiaries of the war, snagging five lucrative deals. While Western firms were largely subdued in their interest in Iraq's recent oil auctions, China snapped up three contracts, shrugging off the security risks and the country's political instability for the promise of oil.

From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West's largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. So have a slew of American oil service companies, including Halliburton, the Texas-based firm Dick Cheney ran before becoming George W. Bush's running mate in 2000...

Bypassing parliament, the firms started signing contracts that provide all of the access and most of the favorable treatment the Hydrocarbons Law would provide - and the Bush administration helped draft the model contracts.

Upon leaving office, Bush and Obama administration officials have even worked for oil companies as advisers on their Iraq endeavors. For example, former US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad's company, CMX-Gryphon, "provides international oil companies and multinationals with unparalleled access, insight and knowledge on Iraq."

The new contracts lack the security a new legal structure would grant, and Iraqi lawmakers have argued that they run contrary to existing law, which requires government control, operation, and ownership of Iraq's oil sector.

But the contracts do achieve the key goal of the Cheney energy task force: all-but-privatizing the Iraqi oil sector and opening it to private foreign companies.

Iraq's oil production has increased by more than 40% in the last five years to 3 million barrels of oil a day (still below the 1979 high of 3.5 million set by Iraq's state-owned companies), but a full 80% of this is being exported out of the country while Iraqis struggle to meet basic energy consumption needs

The war is the one and only reason for this long sought and newly acquired access.

Oil was not the only goal of the Iraq War, but it was certainly the central one, as top US military and political figures have attested to in the years following the invasion.

Even major Republican leaders have admitted it:

'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.' - Alan Greenspan

My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will -- that will then prevent us -- that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East - John McCain

We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go. - Sarah Palin

People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America's national interest. What the hell do you think they're talking about? We're not there for figs. - Chuck Hagel, Republican Senator and SecDef

"Of course it's about oil, it's very much about oil, and we can't really deny that." - 4 Star General John Abizaid - the former commander of CENTCOM

In 2002, Chalabi [the Iraqi politician and oil minister who the Bush Administration favored to lead Iraq after the war] joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia

First, the assumption is based on mortality rates continuing their same historic decline as during the 1980s; if the expectation benchmark was fixed to 1989 levels, the "excess death" number would be closer to 400,000. Second, UNICEF found that under-five mortality actually decreased in the autonomous north, while doubling in Saddam-controlled regions, giving pro-sanctions (and pro-war) advocates evidence that the Iraqi dictator was largely to blame. (It is also true that the north received far more international aid.).  Thirdly, and most importantly, the UNICEF study never once assigned anything like 100 percent of the blame to UN resolutions. "It's very important not to just say that everything rests on sanctions," UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy said in an interview at the time. "It is also the result of wars and the reduction in investment in resources for primary healthcare."

The study was so often cited after the Sept. 11, 2001 massacres as evidence for the "blowback" interpretation of the air attacks, that UNICEF had to rush out another clarifying press release.
"The surveys were never intended to provide an absolute figure of how many children have died in Iraq as a result of sanctions," the statement read. Rather, they show that "if there hadn't been two wars, if sanctions hadn't been introduced and if investment in social services had been maintained ­ there would have been 500,000 fewer deaths of children under five."

You won't becuase you can't. What you will do is try and change the subject.

And yes, WMD's were not found in the quantities expected. And yes, we should have just carpet bombed Iraq to the point that they couldn't have did what Saddam wanted to do, produce WMD's, for another 30 years and left. Instead we decided to play goody two shoes and spend billions "nation building,"

You know, like Obama is doing with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt right now.

BTW - Consider this:

Iraq's WMD programs spanned more than two decades, involved thousands of people, billions of dollars, and were elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The very scale of this program when coupled with the conditions in Iraq that have prevailed since the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom dictate the speed at which we can move to a comprehensive understanding of Iraq's WMD activities.

We need to recall that in the 1991-2003 period the intelligence community and the UN/IAEA inspectors had to draw conclusions as to the status of Iraq's WMD program in the face of incomplete, and often false, data supplied by Iraq or data collected either by UN/IAEA inspectors operating within the severe constraints that Iraqi security and deception actions imposed or by national intelligence collection systems with their own inherent limitations.

snip

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:

snip

· New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

· Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

· A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

· Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.

· Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km -- well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

· Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment

snip

Discussions with Iraqi scientists uncovered agent R&D work that paired overt work with nonpathogenic organisms serving as surrogates for prohibited investigation with pathogenic agents.

Examples include: B. Thurengiensis (Bt) with B. anthracis (anthrax), and medicinal plants with ricin.

In a similar vein, two key former BW scientists, confirmed that Iraq under the guise of legitimate activity developed refinements of processes and products relevant to BW agents. The scientists discussed the development of improved, simplified fermentation and spray drying capabilities for the simulant Bt that would have been directly applicable to anthrax, and one scientist confirmed that the production line for Bt could be switched to produce anthrax in one week if the seed stock were available.