The principal justification Bush gave the international community for starting a preemptive war with Iraq was the claim that Saddam Hussein was in possession of "weapons of mass destruction". The legalistic figleaf the "Coalition" used to commence hostilities, U.N. Resolution 1441, relied exclusively on that claim; Saddam's human rights record and his ties with terrorist organizations hardly factored in. Foreign opposition, from Russia, France and Germany, centered on skepticism about U.S. claims about the development and extent of the Iraqi program.

Well, today, the other shoe has apparently dropped. The 75th Exploitation Task Force, the principal unit designed to uncover the wherabouts of the Iraqi WMD program, is dissolving, having found nothing to date. According to the Washington Post, "Army Col. Richard McPhee...said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given 'release authority' to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. 'We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits' for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, 'there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time.' "

Looks like someone owes Jacques Chirac and the cheese-eating surrender monkeys an apology.