GREYHAWK BLOGS FROM IRAQ:

How many times has this happened to you:

You’re flying into Baghdad on a C130 along with a lot of other GIs and some members of the Iraq Survey Group whose report will soon be released and while waiting for the plane engines to fire up (after which point conversation becomes impossible) you say: “So what’s the bottom line?”

And one responds: “He didn’t have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but he could have reconstituted his programs in a matter of months.”

Which is exactly what I’ve thought for quite a while (ahem) please see my April 6 2003 post here. Really, it’s short, go read, and note that the Thunder Run was ongoing at that time, but the media spin had already begun. But given the myriad reasons why the time was right for ending the Hussein regime it’s an issue of only minor importance to me – more significant as political strategy than military – but what do I know?

Read the whole thing. Related matters here, too. And there’s some useful perspective here.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus weighs in on the Duelfer Report:

If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that?

Bush’s! Everything’s his fault — at least until November 3d. . . .