Anti-war leftists in the Democratic Party and their stooges in the mainstream media bludgeoned George Bush for years charging he lied about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. Has an anti-war, left-wing leaker inadvertently furnished information that proves Bush right, after all?
Buried in the thousands of WikiLeak documents dumped on the Internet in October related to the war in Iraq are various reports about the discovery of chemical weapons caches inside Iraq—reports which contradict the revisionist narrative about the justification for the war. Scattered throughout the roughly 392,000 documents illegally published by WikiLeaks are accounts of U.S., coalition and Iraqi forces finding chemical munitions left 
behind by Saddam Hussein’s overthrown regime.
My, my, my Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, none of you have bothered to utter a word about THIS have you. You and your flunkies were exuberant in attacking the Bush Administration, and President Bush personally, weren’t you. But, of course, being a Democrat means you NEVER have to say you’re sorry.
According to the leaked documents, the chemical munitions recovered appeared to be manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War, after which Iraqi forces were required to surrender and destroy their illegal chemical weapons. The leaked documents are a reminder that Saddam Hussein’s regime could not be trusted to fulfill its disarmament obligations and fully cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, as the Bush Administration correctly argued before the 2003 war.
Most in the mainstream media have downplayed the finding of chemical weapons. They argued that the discovered munitions were not the massive quantities the Bush Administration claimed it was looking for. These commentators conveniently overlooked the fact that the presence of chemical weapons is concrete proof that Saddam’s regime failed to comply with its legal obligations to destroy all weapons of mass destruction, as required by the cease-fire agreement that ended the 1991 Gulf War and more than a dozen subsequent U.N. Security Council resolutions. This additional evidence of Iraqi noncompliance furnishes convincing proof, if any is still needed, that refutes the revisionist narrative that the Bush Administration fought an “illegal” war in Iraq.
We must also not forget about the claims by US military that information had been uncovered that Iraq had covertly moved large amounts of WMD’s over the border into Syria prior to hostilities in 2003.
The media ignored that, too.
The left’s attacks on Bush centered on the fact that the US failed to find massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction after the war. That failure, in their opinion, discredited the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war in the first place. The real rationale for going to war was that Saddam’s regime was not cooperating with U.N. weapons inspectors. That being the case, the United States and its allies were fully justified in undertaking military operations to make sure that Iraq did not have the WMD stockpiles or the programs to build WMD’s that the U.N. inspectors previously had confirmed it had. Iraq already had used prohibited chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war and against Iraqi Kurds who had rebelled against the regime.
Of course, the talking heads on TV refused to consider those violations when they were attacking Bush.
The burden of proof was on Iraq’s non-compliant regime, not on the “coalition” which was enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions. U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, which set the terms of the cease-fire that 
ended the 1991 war that expelled Iraqi forces that had invaded Kuwait, required that: Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:
- (a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;
- (b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers and related major parts, and repair and production facilities;
Not only was Iraq not cooperating with inspectors in destroying its WMD stockpiles and facilities, it was found to have missiles that exceeded the 150-kilometer range limits. These clear violations of the 1991 cease-fire technically put Iraq back into a state of war with the United States. The Bush Administration was not alone in finding that Iraqi noncompliance on WMD issues merited a military response. The Clinton Administration also cited Iraq’s noncompliance as justification for launching Operation Desert Fox, four days of air strikes against Iraqi targets, in December 1998. Many critics who charged that the Bush Administration made up stories about Iraqi WMD’s as a false justification for war against Iraq conveniently ignore the fact that the Clinton Administration based its military attacks on the same premise.
The people behind the WikiLeaks document release should be tracked down and prosecuted in American courts. But if anything positive comes out of their dangerous and reckless actions, it is that, contrary to popular “wisdom”, Iraq did in fact possess illegal chemical weapons that it failed to destroy before the 2003 war.
