JB

At least this seems to follow from these remarks in his weekly radio address, as reported by Reuters:

President Bush, floating a new explanation for the failure to find banned weapons, said suspected arms sites had been looted as Saddam's government crumbled.

"For more than a decade, Saddam Hussein went to great lengths to hide his weapons from the world. And in the regime's final days, documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

One of the reasons why war skeptics like myself opposed the war was that if we attacked Saddam he might give away his weapons of mass destruction to terrorist organizations, or those weapons would be spirited out of Iraq during the chaos and confusion of war. Because the stated reason for the war was to make American more secure from weapons of mass destruction held by rogue states, attacking Saddam might well prove to be counterproductive.

In his eagerness to explain why the weapons of mass destruction have not been found (and thus why the Administration was not misleading the public about their existence) the President has now essentially conceded that the very dangers war skeptics warned about may have occurred-- he is attempting to justify the failure to find weapons of mass destruction on the theory that these weapons may have been stolen during the war.

What I want to know is why isn't this an even bigger problem for the Administration than the possibliity that Saddam no longer had weapons of mass destruction when we attacked him? If the Administration concedes the possibility that the weapons were looted, then it has conceded that in its eagerness to go to war it has made Americans less safe, not more. This is not an accomplisment of which the Administration should be particularly proud. It suggests rather that the Administration belicose policies have backfired. And as Americans continue to die in Iraq, and Afghanistan teeters on the verge of collapse, the Administration's foreign policy failures are mounting day by day.

I only wish someone in Congress would have the courage to point this out.