Another of the Left's attacks on Bush and Blair for leading a coalition to remove Saddam Hussein from power and liberate Iraq seems to have crumbled.

Much of the criticism seems to have faded away with the discovery of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, buried in mass graves all over the country. Some were children. Some were still alive.  It is said (or so I'm told) that there are as many mass graves as there once were pictures of Saddam.  There are still too many people who couldn't accept the fact that Saddam was such a bad person (the Left believes there is no evil except Bush) that he had to be removed without waiting for as long as his allies the French wanted him in power.  The bones in those graves tell us that twelve years was already far too long to have waited.

That still leaves the rather small (but vocal) crowd that believes it was wrong to liberate Iraq no matter what, because they feel they weren't told the strict, literal, absolute truth about his weapons of mass destruction.  They claim the President lied about something or other. (This changes frequently.)  They'd like to pretend that the entire Western world wasn't privy to the same knowledge, the intelligence that led Bill Clinton to state that "Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons" and "One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." (Of course, aside from lobbing in a few cruise missiles, he was content to leave Saddam alone to rebuild without those pesky UN inspectors bothering him.)  They'd like to pretend, as Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said, that "this whole thing was a fraud".  (Of course, that doesn't quite mesh with his assertion in 2002 that "we have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction", does it?)  As more evidence comes to light in Iraq every day, their cheap political stunts paint them further into a corner.

Here's a case in point: Tony Blair has been viciously attacked by the press and those against Iraqi liberation for presenting a dossier which stated in part,

Intelligence reports make clear that he sees the building up of his WMD capability, and the belief overseas that he would use these weapons, as vital to his strategic interests, and in particular his goal of regional domination. And the document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.

Well, the man who gave British intelligence that information has at last come forward to assert the truth of his claim.  According to today's Sunday Telegraph,

An Iraqi colonel who commanded a front-line unit during the build-up to the war in Iraq has revealed how he passed top secret information to British intelligence warning that Saddam Hussein had deployed weapons of mass destruction that could be used on the battlefield against coalition troops in less than 45 minutes.

Lt-Col al-Dabbagh, 40, who was the head of an Iraqi air defence unit in the western desert, said that cases containing WMD warheads were delivered to front-line units, including his own, towards the end of last year.

In an exclusive interview with the Telegraph, Col al-Dabbagh said that he believed he was the source of the British Government's controversial claim, published in September last year in the intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam could launch WMD within 45 minutes.

He also insisted that the information contained in the dossier relating to Saddam's battlefield WMD capability was correct. "It is 100 per cent accurate," he said after reading the relevant passage.

"Forget 45 minutes," said Col al-Dabbagh "we could have fired these within half-an-hour."

Col al-Dabbagh, who spied for the Iraqi National Accord (INA), a London-based exile group, for several years before the war, said, however, that he provided several reports to British intelligence on Saddam's plans to deploy WMD from early 2002 onwards.

Of course, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting to hear the apologises Mr. Blair deserves for the unconscionable attacks on his character made by the pro-Saddam, pro-terrorist faction masquerading as anti-war groups.  The only thing they're "anti" is the spread of that terrible "democracy" stuff.