A mushroom cloud like the ones which mysteriously failed to appear above the skyline of a major US city.
According to the Washington Post the search for those ever elusive pesky weapons of mass destruction ended last month, with a complete failure to find anything:
The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.
In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.
Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to
Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration
officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S.
invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and
biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons
to use against the United States.Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official
said that possibility is very small.
And it only took them the better part of two years, uncounted (literally!) numbers of dead Iraqi civilians, well over a thousand dead US soldiers, quite a few more dead soldiers from countries stupid enough to follow the US into Iraq, billions upon billions of wasted money and Halliburton bribes, the renewed vigour of international terrorism to reach that conclusion. Gee.
What I would like to see now is those people who before the war rubbished anybody who dared to suggest that Bush and blair were lying about this publically apologise for their support of a war that costs some 100,000 Iraqis their lives (as a conservative estimate) and turned Iraq into a second Somalia. Well done.