Much to the delight of the opponents of
the war in Iraq, and to the consternation of Bush and Blair and their
respective administrations, commission of inquiry after commission of inquiry
and commentator upon commentator have wrongly concluded that there was no
smoking gun in the war, since no weapons of mass destruction were found,
therefore the entire rationale and justification of the war went up in smoke.
However, this essay will show that those
commentators, and committees, who had nothing more than political calculations
behind their minds, had falsely concluded that the absence of evidence
amounted to evidence of absence. For there is much circumstantial proof that
Saddam did have WMD, hid some of it before the war, transferred other parts to
fellow-dictators like him in the Muslim world and destroyed some of it. But
there is no better proof that he had it as the death by chemical warfare of
thousands of Kurds and Iranians at the hands of Iraqis.
In short, there was a corpse of the
victim, fingerprints of Saddam, blood stains and a blood trail. Only the
pistol which was thrown into the river was not found. But any fair-minded
court of law would have convicted the culprit nevertheless.
