JB

The BBC now reports that the interim report of the Iraq Survey Group will state that they have discovered no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that it is very likely unlikely that Iraq distributed such weapons to Syria before the war began.

Mr Neil said that according to the source, the report will say its inspectors have not even unearthed "minute amounts of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons material".

They have also not uncovered any laboratories involved in deploying weapons of mass destruction and no delivery systems for the weapons.

But, Mr Neil added, the report would publish computer programmes, files, pictures and paperwork which it says shows that Saddam Hussein's regime was attempting to develop a weapons of mass destruction programme.

My greatest concern had been that the reason why no WMD's were found is because they were spirited out of the country by terrorists during the chaos of the war. But if this report about the Iraq Survey Report is to be believed, there were no weapons to spirit out at all. At most there was were plans for a program that was in "suspended animation"-- i.e., with various elements placed around the country so that Iraqi scientists could begin working on starting up a weapons program as soon as international inspectors turned their attention away from Iraq. This is the dispersion and reassembly theory mentioned in my previous post.

In my previous post I suggested that such a discovery might take some of the heat off the Administration. But on further reflection, I am not so sure anymore. If the weapons programs would remain in suspended animation as long as eyes were on Iraq, then a strategy of containment was probably fully adequate to deal with the future threat posed by Iraq, precisely what the Bush Administration denied in the months leading up to the war. Thus, even though the Administration may want to take some comfort out of findings of a dormant weapons program, those very findings suggest that it badly misjudged the situation in Iraq and chose the wrong strategy for dealing with the threat of WMD's.