Damn, the truth hurts…

Apropos of the Mencken quote above, we have the following:

Iraq weapons hunt is officially over
By Seattle Times news services, January 12, 2005

The hunt for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley, VA.

In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.

Four months after Charles Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al-Qaida affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official said that possibility is very small. ...

There’s more at the link.

Oh well, Dear Leader can probably somehow morph the WMD that became “WMD-related research programs” into something like “WMD video-game software DVD bootlegging operations” that demand the application of bunker busting bombs.

Lookout Syria!