HERE’S AN INTERESTING BBC TRANSCRIPT on weapons of mass destruction. Excerpt:

George Eykyn:
Not only that but they also didn’t say that they were working on the basis of an assumption, did they? In fact, if I remember that Tony Blair told Parliament that Iraq could actually use its weapons of mass destruction within something like forty-five minutes. It was that kind of specific information which gave the impression of a clear and imminent danger to western society.

Simon Henderson:
Yes there is two parts to that. One is that we know and the United Nations knows – and even the UN inspectors of Hans Blix etc. were unable to discover what had happened to all the weapons or the capability of making weapons – the raw materials for it – that we know Iraq had had and Iraq had failed to give a good explanation. Forty-five minutes – I always read that as not as if there was going to be a missile firing at us in forty-five minutes time. That some of this material – chemical and biological, but certainly chemical, was for use on artillery shells, and these artillery shells, equipped in this way, could be distributed to front line Iraqi army units within that time, if necessary. . . .

George Eykyn:
Dr M.V. Diboll, United Arab Emirates asks: Why is it that in the 80s, when it was no secret that he had and was using chemical weapons, Saddam was a tyrant we were more than happy to do business with? Why did Britain and America suddenly decide that Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDs was a casus beli – a reason to go to war?

Simon Henderson:
Well I think the questioner there is rewriting history. It’s not the way that I remember the 1980s. The 1980s – and I ended up writing a biography of Saddam Hussein in 1990 – I did a lot of work in Iraq in the 1980s and the people who were supplying military equipment to Saddam’s Iraq were noticeably the Soviet Union and the other parts of the Soviet bloc – China, France. And Britain and the United States supplied extremely little military equipment to Saddam because we realised what a diabolical regime it was. And so your questioner is pointing his finger in the wrong direction in terms of blame. . . .

Iraq is a huge country. For European viewers, I believe it’s twice the size of France and France itself is the biggest country in western Europe. It is the size of California, if you are an American. It is huge. It is not difficult to hide things in such places. You don’t just pour it into the sand. I suppose some of it might have been hidden in that way but you store in some way and eventually it will be found. There were not just hundreds, there were thousands of technicians, scientists, engineers working on these projects when we knew that existed back in the ’80s. Some of them were retained into the ’90s and they will have stories to tell. Perhaps they haven’t come forward yet, or their debriefings haven’t been released.

Read the whole thing, which I suspect won’t get the attention it deserves.

UPDATE: Rich Lowry points out that it’s rather dishonest for people to pretend that the Bush Administration somehow invented the notion that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were a major threat, and he has scads of quotes from Clinton Administration officials to prove it. He adds:

The failure so far to find WMD in Iraq is a major embarrassment for President Bush, and congressional hearings into the intelligence prior to the Iraq War are welcome. But the post-Iraq debate shouldn’t proceed on false pretenses: Everyone this side of famed Iraqi prevaricator Baghdad Bob believed that Iraq had WMD. In the run-up to the war, the United Nations, the “axis of weasel” (France and Germany) and high-profile Democrats all agreed about WMD.

The specific figures in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s U.N. presentation about Iraq’s unaccounted-for WMD came from U.N. inspectors. France and Germany didn’t argue that Saddam had no WMD, but inspections could rid him of them. Clinton and Al Gore dissented from aspects of Bush’s policy, but agreed about WMD. “We know,” Gore said, “he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons.”

The question was what to do about a dictator with ties to terrorism who for 12 years had defied the procedures set out by the world to confirm that he no longer had dangerous weapons. For the Bush administration, Sept. 11 meant erring on the side of safety, and so continuing to accept Saddam’s denials and defiance wasn’t an option.

As someone once warned: “This is not a time free from peril, especially as a result of the reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals. We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century.” Even if the rhetoric was shrill, Bill Clinton had a point.

“Unholy axis?” My goodness: simplisme!