So that's what it has all come down to: Nothing but paper rockets. Two CDs that fit into the pocket of a brilliant Iraqi rocket designer. Ideas for a development program that never left the drawing board. Undeclared during the UNMOVIC visits, yes, but never more than electronic paper, and only a delivery system without a payload. No WMDs, and the sum total of banned weapon "development" found by David Kay's US WMD inspection team.
A lengthy and detailed article from today's Washington Post. Of course, Kay's group has found much more, and even some significant and credible planning for WMDs, but they seem to share a common characteristic: they were abandoned shortly after our first war against Iraq. And Kay's group discovered something else: an official high-level Iraqi memo saying that the UNSCOM and CIA 1995 debriefings of defector Hussein Kamel, then leader of Iraqi weapons development, were both correct and complete in his claims that Iraq had abondoned fully the development of banned weapons. [The UNSCOM debriefing transcript (PDF) of Kamel's testimony to them was available on the internet prior to the start of our second Iraq war and he explicitly stated in it, "All weapons-- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed." (See also the FAIR media advisory on this.) The CIA debriefing is not, but is reported to be almost identical in matters of fact.]
David Kay of course is leaving as head of the that inspection team, and why not? Much of his staff has been reassigned to counter-insurgency intelligence, and of course they are needed there. You have to give Kay some well due credit however. There must have been some very real pressure on him to shill his findings for the press, and clearly, he did a fairly good job at not doing that, especially given the initial doubts of those who opposed the war.
But the inspection teams, reduced as they are, will continue their work, perhaps for another year -- or if you are counting, until after the elections.
And so we have paper rockets ... and 9,000 dead.
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