In your face

The West Virginia Gazette delivers an editorial that reminds us all that, when it came to the invasion of Iraq, Sen Robert Byrd was right.

Oh, yeah, and so were all the U.N. weapons inspectors:

Of all the claims U.S. intelligence made about Iraq's arsenal in the fall and winter of 2002, it was a handful of new charges that seemed the most significant: secret purchases of uranium from Africa, biological weapons being made in mobile laboratories and pilotless planes that could disperse anthrax or sarin gas above U.S. cities.

By the time President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein of the deadly weapons he was allegedly trying to build, every piece of fresh evidence had been tested — and disproved — by U.N. inspectors, according to a report commissioned by the president and released Thursday.

The work of the inspectors, who had extraordinary access during their three months in Iraq between November 2002 and March 2003, was routinely dismissed by the Bush administration and the intelligence community before the war, according to the commission led by former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., and retired appellate court judge Laurence Silberman.

But the commission's findings, including a key judgment that U.S. intelligence knows "disturbingly little" about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, are leading to calls for greater reliance on U.N. inspectors to test intelligence where the United States has little or no access.