So this is not just a “find” in itself — such gas centrifuges are used for the enrichment of uranium — but evidence of a larger and wider design to fool the international community and to wait for a better day to restart Saddam’s nuclear program. If you find hard physical and documentary evidence, along with a complex plan to keep it under wraps, you are entitled to make a few presumptions, not including the presumption of innocence. Nobody bothers to cover up nothing...

This breakthrough, which comes quite early in the inspection process and which will not be the only one of its kind, might possibly quiet the idiotic and premature wailings of the “anti-war” side, who have been saying for weeks that the whole indictment of Saddam Hussein was a put-up job. Then again, it probably won’t have that effect. The wailers will settle for nothing less than the full-dress conspiracy theory. It’s true that they have been helped in this, in some respects, by elements in both the Blair and Bush regimes that banged the drum a little too loud. But this is not to compare like with like.

In 1990-91, during the occupation of Kuwait, U.S. officials circulated a graphic atrocity story to the effect that Iraqi forces had taken Kuwaiti babies out of hospital incubators and dumped them on the cold floor. It was one of the great sob stories of all time, and it undoubtedly affected the Senate vote in favor of war, but it was completely made up by a Kuwaiti public relations firm with links to the Bush administration. People were understandably upset when they were shown to have been emotionally stampeded. But soon after, Kuwait City was recovered by U.N. forces who unearthed atrocities and massacres 50 times as foul. Indeed, the search even now continues for several hundred Kuwaiti POWs who haven’t been seen since. 1991 was obviously a vintage year for the Baathists to start burying some of the evidence of their past crimes-and also of their future intentions...

There is a difference, in other words, between propaganda and research, and the difference always becomes blurred in wartime. However, to believe that the Saddam regime had nothing to hide is to believe that he threw out the U.N. inspectors in 1998 and then said to himself: “Great. Now I can get on with my dream of unilaterally disarming Iraq!” Who can be such a fool as to believe any such thing? But that’s how Jeffrey Dahmer got away with it for so long: There are enough kind-hearted and soft-headed people around who don’t recognize evil even when it is glaring them brazenly in the face.

From an excellent article by the ever unpredictable Christopher Hitchens. The left is asking us to believe, not that Saddam didn't have WMDs, but that he never had WMDs. Not even the French think that's true. It is highly significant that this discovery has been ignored (not unlike the uprising in Iran) by the mainstream media. The only news we hear from that region are the Iraqi "resistance" (read Saddamite guerillas) and Israel being intransigent. The agenda at work is pretty obvious.