Extra Crispy

Bush as toast, that is. If the powers behind the throne wanted aWol to continue, this report would have been supressed until after the election:

Iraq had essentially destroyed its illicit weapons capability within months after the Persian Gulf War ended in 1991, and its capacity to produce such weapons had eroded even further by the time of the American invasion in 2003, the top American inspector in Iraq said in a report made public today.

The report, by Charles A. Duelfer, said the last Iraqi factory capable of producing militarily significant quantities of unconventional weapons was destroyed in 1996. The findings amounted to the starkest portrayal yet of a vast gap between the Bush administration's prewar assertions about Iraqi weapons and what a 15-month postinvasion inquiry by American investigators concluded were the facts on the ground.

At the time of the American invasion, Mr. Duelfer concluded, Iraq had not possessed military-scale stockpiles of illicit weapons for a dozen years and was not actively seeking to produce them.

The White House portrayed the war as a bid to disarm Iraq of unconventional weapons, and had invoked images of mushroom clouds, deadly gases and fearsome poisons. But Mr. Duelfer concluded that even if Iraq had sought to restart its weapons programs in 2003, it could not have produced militarily significant quantities of chemical weapons for at least a year, and would have required years to produce a nuclear weapon.

"Saddam Hussein ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the gulf war," Mr. Duelfer said in his report, which added that American inspectors in Iraq had "found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program."

Note not only did the report come out today, in the middle of debate season, but that the NY Times feels free to compare the reality of the report with the fantasy the Bushies were peddling. Two years ago, the Times was part of that peddling. Now, all the news that's fit to print includes a bit of truth. The powers that be are, as your mother would say, "through with you," George W. Bush.