Yes, the weapons existed. The point I am trying to make is that the world community needed for those weapons to be accounted for. It now appears that the UN, who were trusted to do this, did not do so in good faith. They took advantage of the system that was designed to pressure Hussein’s government such that it put billions in his accounts, money in their own pockets and caused the very people that the UN claims to protect, to suffer. (I believe that the Unicef report that came out in ’97 indicated that near 500,000 children 5 years old and under had died as a direct result of the sanctions.)

The Bush administration’s decision to go to war was a brash move that put a lot of real people in peril, but the so-called diplomatic efforts were also very deadly (with comparitively little in the way of public outrage) and did not seem to be yielding much. The sanctions were grinding the weak and poor and the oil-for-food kickbacks were funding Sadaam.

With the view we now have into Iraq and the UN-management of sanctions and weapons inspections, it becomes increasingly apparent that there was (and is) a real problem at the top. The UN does not seem ready to acknowledge problems or reform.

Accounting for the weapons in order to prevent military action would have been good. That’s my point.