After spending more than a year attacking the Bush administration daily for their supposed failure to produce the WMDs that everyone -- including the United Nations, as well as most leading Democrats -- believed Saddam had hidden, the Left has suddenly gone strangely silent on the subject. The "mainstream" media has been tiptoeing around the discovery of a 155-mm mortar shell containing Sarin gas in Iraq, the contents of which have been confirmed. The shell was used as part of an improvised explosive device (IED) on a road near the Baghdad International Airport, and exploded as it was being disarmed.

The shell contained three liters of Sarin -- nearly a gallon. It was a type of shell designed to mix chemical components during flight, which was why the explosion didn't kill anyone (though two soldiers were treated for exposure). Three liters of Sarin is enough, if the components are mixed properly, to realistically kill hundreds, and potentially thousands. A concentration of 100 milligrams of Sarin per cubic meter of air is enough to constitute a lethal dose for half the people breathing it within one minute.

This type of chemical warfare shell had never been declared by Iraq -- it was not even known that Iraq had ever made them. The 1999 UNSCOM report on Iraq reported that thirty binary/Sarin shells were known to exist, and stated that all had been accounted for. According to UNSCOM, "Iraq developed a crude type of binary munition, whereby the final mixing of the two precursors to the agent was done inside the munition just before delivery." Someone actually had to physically pour the components of the Sarin (or other type of G-series nerve agent) into the shells before they could be fired. At least, that's how the ones we knew about worked.

So, a previously-unknown type of artillery shell is found in Iraq, containing an actual, verifiable chemical weapon. This is front page news, right? Should we expect apologies from formerly doubting Liberals? Newspapers filled with retractions from prominent Democrats? Conciliatory visits to President Bush from Jaques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroeder? Not so fast. Remember: it's an election year. Liberals, Democrats, terrorists and appeasers all want President Bush to lose the election so everyone can get back to business as usual. Terrorists want to get back to their implacable war against Western civilisation, and the others want to get back to trying to placate them. The media, as long as we let them get away with it, will only run stories that attack President Bush and undermine support for him. In fact, Liberals already have their spin on this Sarin find ready to go. The vast majority of them -- when you can get them to admit that the Sarin and the shell are real -- argue that it doesn't matter for one of four "reasons."

A. The shell is old, from before the 1991 Gulf War, so it's not what we were looking for.

Since the cease-fire that suspended the Gulf War depended on Saddam's handing over to the UN "[a]ll chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities", this shell is precisely what we were looking for, especially if it predates 1991. This shell and others like it is why the UN passed 17 resolutions demanding that Saddam disarm. No matter how old it was, it was still lethal. There is no statute of limitations on weapons of mass destruction.

B. There is only one shell, not a stockpile, so it doesn't mean anything.

This one shell contained enough WMD material to potentially kill as many people as died on 9/11, all by itself. Is it logical to assume that this is the only one in existence -- or just wishful thinking? The fact is that we still don't know how much Sarin Iraq actually produced. "At first, Iraq told UNSCOM that it had produced an estimated 250 tons of tabun and 812 tons of sarin. In 1995, Iraq changed its estimates and reported it had produced only 210 tons of tabun and 790 tons of sarin." (Yes, that's tons.) At the very least, it tells us that we haven't nearly finished looking for the WMDs that Saddam was supposed to surrender, and didn't. Besides... a shell containing mustard gas was also found. Well, maybe there were only two WMD shells in all of Iraq.

C. Just because Saddam had WMDs after all, it doesn't mean Bush didn't lie about them.

As ridiculous as it sounds, this appears to be the instinctive, defensive reaction of many Liberals to this news. They so badly need to believe that President Bush lied in order to legitimise their hatred of him that they're capable of this sort of twisted reasoning. The rationale seems to be that WMDs don't count if they aren't exactly where the CIA told us they were, as if they couldn't be moved.

D. The terrorists didn't even know it was a chemical shell.

Well, they do now. And they know where they found it, too.

We need to redouble our efforts to stop the terrorists and find Saddam's WMDs, before they're used to derail the new Iraqi government's formation. The media's refusal to give this news the coverage it deserves can only be due to a calculated attempt to reduce American support for our efforts in Iraq, including that of tracking down Saddam's banned weapons. The Left's deliberate silence on this subject for the purpose of influencing our election only helps our enemies.