One Good Canadian Anyway

After Canada bashing last night, fairness requires a pointer to Marcus Gee's article in yesterday's Globe and Mail. Gee addresses the current hand ringing about the failure to find WMDs in Iraq:

But whose fault is that in the end? By developing WMD before the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and hiding them afterward, Mr. Hussein showed he could not be trusted. His constant attempts to conceal his facilities from international weapons inspectors, and his decision to stop co-operating with them altogether in 1998, confirmed his reputation. Given all his cheating over the years, the onus was on him to show that he had abandoned his weapons programs.

For reasons that are still mysterious, he refused. Even after he allowed weapons inspectors back into Iraq in 2002, his regime failed to co-operate properly with them or account for missing weapons stocks. As a result, everyone quite reasonably assumed his guilt. In October of 2002, the National Intelligence Council, the Vatican of the U.S. spy community, concluded that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons" and "if left unchecked, it will probably have nuclear weapons during this decade." The Israeli, Russian, Chinese, German and British intelligence services came to similar conclusions. Even French President Jacques Chirac, the leading European opponent of the war, said that the "probable possession" of WMD by an "uncontrollable country" such as Iraq was a problem. So the blame for the war lies with Mr. Hussein, who might have saved himself by coming clean but would not, and paid the price.

Read the whole thing.

Update:

David Warren said much the same back on January 31st:

Western intelligence reports are therefore easy to explain, for they depended entirely on intercepted communications, easily-misinterpreted satellite pictures, and the reports of Iraqi defectors. All these sources tended to confirm that the Iraqi regime was trying to hide big things; none could guess it was trying to hide big things that didn't exist. For even if Saddam had the fondest inkling what was up, he would still not have come clean with Hans Blix or George Bush, for he needed to maintain the illusion of being lethally armed in order to keep his own people scared into submission, to aggrandize himself as leader of the Arab world, and, in his own strange little mind, to persuade the U.S. and Britain that he could inflict too many casualties to make a war against him worth having.

Further Update:

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld agrees, in a speech in Munich today:

Mr. Rumsfeld placed the blame for the war squarely on Saddam Hussein for his "deception and defiance," and refusal to abandon his illegal weapons program, as Libya did recently. "It was his choice," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a speech here to 250 government ministers, lawmakers and national security experts from 30 countries, most of them in Europe. "If the Iraqi regime had taken the same steps Libya is now taking, there would have been no war."