From today's Yale Daily News, this quote from a student whose anti-war ardor has not been dimmed by facts:

Kirby Smith '05 said she is "not happy" about the war. She said she does not support Saddam Hussein but thinks Bush set somewhat unattainable standards for Iraq by requiring the Iraqi government to prove it did not have weapons of mass destruction.

"You can't prove that you don't have something," Smith said. "Nobody's going to step down from power just because Bush says to.

None of those links, funnily enough, had anything concrete. Those scuds did not have WMD warheads, and the chemical plant is still under investigation. As in the first Gulf War, the plant could turn out completely innocous.

Well, reading over it again, are Scuds banned as long range missiles under the UN resolution? If so, I put foot in mouth.

I remember the initial reports about Scud missiles; I also remember later backtracking on this. Iraq is not allowed to possess missiles with a range over 150km. The missile known as a Scud can fly much further, hence it is banned. I have seen no real proof that a Scud missile was fired at Kuwait; certainly the linked report offers none. It could easily have been an Al Samoud, and there was some controversy about whether or not that missile should be banned. It was, but not all were destroyed before the war broke out, and I don't blame Iraq for using the ones that are left. While very suspicious the reports about the plant at Najaf have also been so far inconclusive. I will stay tuned.

This is an honest question. Is there any doubt that Saddam has chemical and biological weapons? He used the former against the Kurds and Shia, and he used the latter (very limited amounts, and not successfully) against the Iranians. There are photographs, eye-witness accounts, even reports from reliable organizations, such as Amnesty International.

If it turns out that Saddam really had no WMD or long-range missiles after all (i.e., the Scuds he fired at us weren't really Scuds, the chemical factory doesn't really make chemicals used in chemical weapons, was camouflaged for purely aesthetic reasons, and was booby-trapped as part of some fraternity prank), it would be embarassing to us, indeed. It would also beg the question, though, of why Saddam Hussein would have conducted such a suspicious campaign of "stealth compliance" rather than coming forward with the credible evidence that would have averted the war (and, alas, preserved his murderous regime). Any egg that ends up on our face now will have to be spread evenly among all countries that voted in favor of Resolution 1441 and found Hussein to be in material breach. Our disagreement with the Axis of Weasels is over what to do about Saddam's material breach, not whether or not there is one.