So, Mr. Hitchens, weren't you wrong about Iraq? - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

Christopher Hitchens answers some tough questions about Iraq on the Fourth Anniversary of the invasion. Most of this I have been arguing with my local leftists and liberals for years, it is nice to see some one else say it finally! This is the reason I started to blog myself, even though I rarely seem to post my own thoughts since the news is moving faster than I can squeeze in time to write. I need to find a few extra hours a day. Maybe I can just skip sleep and showers. No, then I might be mistaken for a liberal!

So, Mr. Hitchens, weren't you wrong about Iraq? - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine:
"Should it not have been known by Western intelligence that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?

The entire record of UNSCOM until that date had shown a determination on the part of the Iraqi dictatorship to build dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, to refuse to allow scientists to be interviewed without coercion, to conceal chemical and biological deposits, and to search the black market for materiel that would breach the sanctions. The defection of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, had shown that this policy was even more systematic than had even been suspected. Moreover, Iraq did not account for—has in fact never accounted for—a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD. Would it have been preferable to accept Saddam Hussein's word for it and to allow him the chance to re-equip once more once the sanctions had further decayed?"