MUCH HAS BEEN MADE in recent days of the fact that coalition forces have not yet found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The BBC, among many other media outlets, has been positively obsessed with this failure–running nonstop packages that juxtapose comments made by Tony Blair and Dick Cheney about the certainly of Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD with reporting on the ground that no such weapons have been found. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Howard Witt explored the curiosity and presented a worst-case scenario: “Much of the political, diplomatic and legal justification for the U.S.-led war rests on the assertion that Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction and has defied repeated United Nations demands to surrender them. If that proves not to be true, the Bush administration’s diplomatic credibility would be shaken, the Muslim world would be reinforced in its belief that Washington is waging war against Islam and U.S. leaders might even be vulnerable to legal challenges in international courts.”

It’s a fair, if somewhat premature, point. The Bush administration and its coalition partners made Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, together with the likelihood that he would work with terrorist networks to use them, the focal point of their arguments for war.