As it turns out, the story on the weapons cache that the New York Times ran yesterday was being held by CBS's 60 Minutes for airing on October 31, right before the election. This election's October Surprise apparently came a week early!
To add insult to injury, we now know that the story was, at best, dubious and lacking in relevant details. NBC News has reported that the weapons disappeared before the liberation of Iraq began. This again raises questions of John Kerry's suggestion that the inspections just needed more time. If these weapons were smuggled out before the liberation of Iraq began, what else got smuggled out? Where did these weapons go to?
Rob Deters (see below) and John Kerry desperately wanted this story to be true and have done their best to explode its impact and wrongly point the finger at President Bush. Deters says, “By my calculations, that's 742,000 planes that could be blown up with the amount of missing explosives gone.” These may not be biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, but they certainly could have caused massive destruction.
This means two things:
1. Saddam Hussein had weapons that could collectively cause mass destruction.
2. About the last thing we should have done was sit around and wait for France, Germany, and the UN to get on board. Who knows what else could have been smuggled out had we done that?
