Iraq and WMDs: A Refresher Course

If mistakes were made, they were Saddam's.

by Rod D. Martin
August 24, 2004

Were Saddam's WMDs a fantasy “concocted in Crawford”? Clearly, Michael Moore and John Kerry want you to think so.

To answer that question, we go where Democrats fear: down memory lane.

The year was 1991. American forces had devastated Iraq's army in Kuwait following Saddam Hussein's invasion the prior year, his second attempted conquest of a neighboring country in just one decade.

For America, the war had gone splendidly. We had not only kept Saddam from seizing Saudi Arabia's oil fields, but compelled him to cough up his Kuwaiti conquest entirely.

Our jubilation, though, was short-lived. In the aftermath, the world awoke to something quite chilling -- the full extent of Saddam's weapons-of-mass-destruction development.

Granted, nobody was surprised by the mere existence of Saddam's WMDs. Saddam had gassed Iran -- and even his own people -- many times, and our troops in Desert Storm were well prepared to confront the same.

But in the summer of 1991, UN inspect…