Reports of the absence of WMD may have been overplayed

Instapundit calls attention to former Iraqi general George Sada's claim that there were WMD in Iraq but they were moved to Syria before the return of UN inspectors. What got me thinking was this update:

UPDATE: Reader Alan Goldstein thinks there's less here than meets the eye: "on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC-FM on March 9th General George said he didn't actually see them himself."

Would critics of George Bush be this finicky if the general was claiming that the war was unjustified? I doubt it. And I know that CBS news wouldn't, based on the episode of the Fake but Accurate documents.

I don't know whether to believe General George or not, but if he's wrong,it would indicate that Saddam was misleading his highest military leaders, or it could be that the general is lying, trying to curry favor with the Bush administration. As Jon Stewart notes:

That would seemingly get the Bush administration off the giant hook that it appears to be on. Why wouldn’t they pursue that line of evidence? Or have they? It seems like for us it would be hard to understand that that really happened. Given that the whole world was looking for those.

I guess we won't know until we go to Syria and find them, but what's to keep the Syrians from moving them to, say, Iran?

I've never thought the failure to find WMD was as big a deal as the left seems to believe. Saddam is a devious man. He was engaged in a project to bribe France and Germany to get the sanctions removed which would mean no more U.N. inspectors. We now know how ble much he was able to corrupt the U.N. Oil for Food program. We know that he had the capability of producing nerve gas, because he used it against Iran and the Kurds. That fact alone made him a threat to all of his neighbors. The willingness of opponents of the war to accept his assurances, strikes me as fatuous in the extreme. It's only by Big Lie techniques that they have convinced anybody. If I were in the media, I'd be ashamed to make such arguments. "We didn't find WMD, therefore Bush knew they weren't there, and lied about Saddam having a WMD program and stockpiles in order to justify the war." There's huge hole in that argument that anybody with any common sense should be able to point out and that any fair-minded commentator would readily acknowledge. The fact that so many journalists have parroted the argument proves to me that they are not objective or reporting in good faith. Their denials of being biased can only be explained by extreme gullibility, lack of critical thinking skills or dishonesty.