[jyl]

We'll never have "absolute" proof one way or the other, of whether Saddam had built an arsenal of moderm WMD and then smuggled them to Syria or hid them on the dark side of the moon.

Like most things in life, we have to make our decisions based on weighing the available evidence.

I personally think that given the time and effort the US govt put into searching for the WMD arsenal, including interrogating Iraq scientists and generals and ex-soldiers, every year that those words go uneaten makes it more and more likely that there is in fact nothing much to eat.

But the point of my first post was a little different, which is that finding old degraded mustard gas shells doesn't say a whole lot about whether Saddam indeed built and hid that arsenal. Not even the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush crowd would have tried to sell America on the idea of launching a major ground war and indefinite occupation at a cost of more or less $100BN/yr to capture some old munitions left over from the Iran-Iraq war.

Heck, thousands of rail cars cross the USA every day, carrying gases and chemicals that are "hazardous and potentially lethal."

Edit: I don't see why it matters if the fine print of some US govt regulation define "WMD" as including Estes D rockets, shoe bombs, pipe bombs, etc. We didn't go to war to seize shoe bombs, or so we thought.