Weekends are notorious for being low news times. This weekend the winter storm in the northern part of the country is a predominant story among the repeat of the previous weeks stories and talking points. Often times stories that are deemed less relevant, or that are addressing issues for those that wish the least amount of attention, are also released late Friday afternoon, or over the weekend for television news which tends to have lower ratings on the weekends to address.

So you are probably wondering why I have chosen the weekend to cover a story such as the WMD’s in Iraq? You may even be wondering why I would be bothering with such an old, overplayed story to begin with.

News stories often get more attention on the weekend through the blogosphere and over the Internet, sometimes even becoming part of the following weeks talking points, though I am quite sure this story will not fall into that category.

Since President Bush and Tony Blair announced that Iraq had WMD’s or was going to be attempting to create WMD’s as a reason listed among many others for justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq groups have used the fact that there was not a series of missile silos armed and ready to fire on the United States or Great Britain as a platform to crucify the character and integrity of these two men and the political parties they represent.

One of the goals here at PoliticallyGrounded.com is to attempt to address political stories in a factual manner. With this in mind it is necessary to view this story from that very angle. It is fact that there were indeed no missile silos primed and fueled ready to launch on the United States or Great Britain, or on any other country for that matter. President Bush announced that Iraq had potentially 30,000 unaccounted for chemical weapons that would fit in the WMD category. Condoleezza Rice, the then National Security Advisor used the statement "we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" to help push Congress’s October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Referring to the intelligence report that stated that Iraq possessed a number of chemical weapons, means to deliver them in violation of the 1993 treaty, and was in the process of attempting to start a nuclear program that would potentially give them the eventual ability to create nuclear weapons.

In the weeks preceding our troops entering Iraq it has been suggested that many of the weapons of mass destruction claimed to be remaining were randomly buried in the deserts of Iraq, transported over a repaired bridge leading into Syria. The fact that Libya announced its nuclear program not long after these accusations has by some been implied to be further supporting evidence in those possibilities. The true fact of those matters is that we will never t know the exact number of weapons that did indeed exist.

Following the facts released by a National Ground Intelligence Center report to Department of Defense in 2006 about the disclosed 500 munitions located in Iraq since 2003 they did indeed constitute as WMD’s. Further the United States removed over 550 metric tons of “yellow cake” the nuclear material needed to get into the Nuclear Weapons business.

So what exactly are we to make out of all these remotely distributed facts? The predominant liberal view, and accusations that the invasion of Iraq was based on lies giving face to unethical desires,or that the invasion was an illegal one, is clearly and inarguably an accusation that is baseless, in fact there were many legal reasons justifying the invasion including a number of U.N. Security Council resolutions going all the way back to before the first Gulf War, the cease fire treaty that ended the original Gulf War, and indeed the finding of WMD’s and the potential for future expansion of those abilities.

The handling of many things in the Iraq war give great justification for many to be critical about, but the lack of the reasons for going into Iraq is not one of those reasons. In short, there was no lying when the President and his administration presented a need to prevent the furtherance of Iraq’s defiance of imposed U.N. Security Council resolutions and broken treaties. That the time to take action was definitely before the U.N. decided to lift current sanctions allowing the Sadam regime to easily act on his intentions.