The left-wing London Independent blurbed a Sunday story, "How the Road to War Was Paved With Lies," by noting that the "legal basis for the war was to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. The war is as unjustified in retrospect as it seemed in advance." In a Sunday Op-Ed in the Japan Times, Ramesh Thakur, vice rector of United Nations University in Tokyo, wrote that "the U.N. was right" since "Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did not possess usable weapons of mass destruction, and therefore he did not pose a threat to regional, U.S. or world security of an urgency and gravity that required instant war to topple him."

Of course these suspicions are amplified in the Arab world. An editorial in the Syrian newspaper Teshreen, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, said, "Isn't it natural to ask: Where are these weapons, which are the only pretext for the invasion of Iraq?" In Tehran, a Monday editorial in the daily newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami attributed the vanished WMD to the skills of shadowy American officials who armed Saddam to begin with. "They did not want any evidence or clue left behind to hint at the existence of 'accomplices' of Saddam, and they wanted all the documents and evidence in this regard to be completely destroyed and vanished," said the newspaper, translated from the Persian by the BBC.

Intriguingly, it is one of the administration's pre-war nemeses, International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei, who is emerging as one less doubtful about the possible presence of WMD -- though he is voicing that belief in the name of insisting that U.N. arms inspectors should be admitted into the country. ElBaradei told CNN on Sunday that with the regime toppled he and the IAEA will better be able to finish their work, since "one of the difficulties we were facing [was] interviewing people freely." ElBaradei said that his team needs to be deployed not merely to check for weapons but to perhaps destroy them. "The fact that there is no Saddam in Iraq anymore does not mean that a new regime will automatically reject weapons of mass destruction," he said.

Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, meanwhile, has given mixed signals. In March he said there were serious questions about Iraq's arms program, including unaccounted-for stocks of VX nerve gas, anthrax, and other biological and chemical weapons. Right before the war began Blix told reporters he was "curious" to see whether coalition forces would turn up any WMD. A few weeks into the war, however, he told the BBC that he had "never maintained or asserted that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, whether anthrax or nerve gas. What we have said is that their reporting on it demonstrated great lacunae in the accounting. But having something unaccounted for is not the same thing as saying it does exist." They could have been destroyed or sold, for example.

Indeed, an emerging Catch-22 criticism of coalition forces is, according to Feinstein, that their "efforts to find WMD have been halfhearted, raising concerns that whatever weapons might be there could fall into the wrong hands." Feinstein predicted that several Democratic elected officials would be making that argument in the coming days.

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