Colin Powell has this rebuttal to yesterday’s post on Cooking the Books:

Speaking in Rome, Powell said he thought the evidence that Iraq had continued to develop such weapons was “overwhelming.”
“There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It wasn’t a figment of anyone’s imagination. Iraq used these weapons against Iran in the late ’80s,” Powell said. “There is no question, there is no debate here.”

Ok, ok. Iraq used chemical weapons in the late ’80s. How, again, did this present a current threat to the US?

“There was no doubt in my mind as I went through the intelligence and as I prepared myself for the (Feb. 5) briefing … that the evidence was overwhelming that they had continued to develop these programs,” he added.

Surely this overwhelming evidence will be presented to the rest of us soon. That UN presentation just didn’t quite do the trick.

Powell noted that the CIA and the Pentagon last week said they had concluded that two truck-trailers found in Iraq could only have been mobile biological weapons factories, although no trace of biological weapons was found in either.

Let’s see, what was the war budget? Something like $80 billion. That works out to $40 billion/truck. Surely, there were more of these truck-trailers rolling around…….

For months before the war the administration spoke with certainty about Iraqi WMD and al Qaeda links. It is becoming increasingly clear that they did not have a real case and struggled to come up with material for Powell’s UN speach. Read this story of the preparation of this speach. CEOs lose their jobs (and should go to jail) and accounting firms disappear when they are caught cooking the books. The same should be true for elected and appointed officials. Via The Road to Surfdom.

I’m shocked. I agree 100% with Paul Wolfowitz on this point:

there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there’s a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two.

The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.

Let me repeat regarding Saddam’s treatment of the Iraqi people: “..it’s not a reason to put American kids lives at risk.” So folks, lets all just stop using the Saddam is a bad guy as adequate in itself as justification.

And, I never thought I’d thank William Kristol for a pointer to anything but it was his article that led me to this quote which has been lost in discussion of another Wolfowitz statement on WMDs. Also via RealClear Politics and James Joyner who was posting on an unrelated subject.
Update: In depth on this from Tim Dunlop and another view from Jerome Badattitudes Doolittle.

Libertarians do battle. Noted ‘paleolibertarian’ Jim Henley decries the current state of the Iraqi war and clearly is getting angrier as he writes:

God damn the men who put our troops in this situation. God damn the men who brought our country to this pass.

Which earns this response on Samizdata, a supposedly libertarian site, from a Perry de Havilland:

So to borrow Jim Henley’s tone, damn to hell all the ‘cowardly’ paleo-libertarians and their socialist confreres who really did not care what Saddam Hussain’s regime was doing to the people in Iraq and who still feel no remorse that all the horrors of Ba’athism would still be happening in Iraq today if they had gotten their way.

Perry and Brian Doss at the new blog Catallarchy.net also argue that things aren’t bad for our troops in Iraq because their death rate (one a day) is less then the US murder rate of 42/day. But that comparison doesn’t work. Let’s say there are 500,000 us troops in Iraq (I think the number is less now) but this makes the calculation easier. If one/day is getting killed that would be equivalent to 560/day getting killed in the US. Doesn’t look like they have better odds to me.

The Saddam was evil excuse does not hold water for those whose own house is not in order (42 murders a day, Enron, 44,000 traffic deaths a year, how many homeless?, the drug war gulags, etc.) and the clearly acceptable libertarian argument of self defense does not seem to apply here.

If you have been poking around the ‘sphere at all today you should already have made it to Bilmon’s WMD chronology. If you haven’t then head over right now for a sobering experience at the Whiskey Bar.
Via Soundbitten who has a nice t-shirt to go along with Bilmon’s chronology.
Update: Tim Dunlop has more on the ‘they destroyed them before the war’ version.
Update 2: The Daily Kos has three relevant posts and lots of comments. Start with this one from early this morning and then read the next 2.