The final remaining hope of the WMD-last-gaspers has been the notion that Saddam did have WMD but transferred it all to Syria before the war. As I recall, the most popular scenario involved a fleet of ambulances and some hideouts in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
But no. Not only did Saddam not have any WMD in Iraq, the Iraq Survey Group has now officially concluded that he didn’t secretly hand it over to Syria either:
Although Syria helped Iraq evade U.N.-imposed sanctions by shipping military and other products across its borders, the investigators "found no senior policy, program, or intelligence officials who admitted any direct knowledge of such movement of WMD."
….Iraqi officials whom the group was able to interview "uniformly denied any knowledge of residual WMD that could have been secreted to Syria," the report said.
Like the grassy knoll folks, I’m sure the WMD conspiracy theorists will latch onto enough loose ends in the report to convince themselves that Saddam really did have WMD but hid it too cleverly for us to find it. You know, because Saddam and his crew were so clever and thorough in everything else they did.
For the rest of us, though, the story is over. Saddam was just a sorry and deluded tinpot tyrant. He posed a major threat to his own people, but never to us.
