Told You So

Duelfer Report, 9/11 Commission, Lord Butler Report, it's becoming predictable; each side -- those who consider Saddam's removal justified and those who don't -- find ammunition for their views in the same pages.

The Daily Telegraph editorializes on Saddam's weapons of mass corruption.

Was it all a mistake? On the contrary: the real case for war, consistently argued in these pages, depended neither on WMD nor on the al-Qa'eda connection. Saddam had to be deposed for both strategic and moral reasons, which have broadly been vindicated. Though the war on terror is far from over, the threat from terrorist states has diminished. If free Iraq can stay the course - by holding elections, by putting Saddam on trial, and by defeating the insurgency - it will have a profound impact on the other despots of the Middle East and beyond.

If anything, the report reinforces the case for regime change, by demonstrating the malign influence that Saddam's Iraq exerted over the entire international system. His capacity for genocide had indeed decayed, but by 2003 he was no longer the pariah he had been in 1991.

Having corrupted and undermined the sanctions regime, Saddam was more dangerous than ever before. The stench of his crimes lingers, not only in Iraq but also at the UN. The justification offered for the war by Mr Blair may have been the wrong one, but it was still a just war.

John Kerry, of course, doesn't see it that way:

Yesterday, the CIA released a wide-ranging report on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The report concluded that Iraq had essentially dismantled its weapons of mass destruction and stopped any further military WMD production after the end of the first Gulf War. In other words, the report concluded that the inspections and the sanctions worked.