MMM . . . KAY . . .

An early draft of an interim report by the American leading the hunt for banned weapons in Iraq says his team has not found any of the unconventional weapons cited by the Bush administration as a principal reason for going to war, federal officials with knowledge of the findings said today.

The long-awaited report by David Kay, the former United Nations weapons inspector who has been leading the American search for illicit weapons, will be the first public assessment of progress in that search since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.

Mr. Kay's team has spent nearly four months searching suspected sites and interviewing Iraqi scientists believed to have knowledge about the country's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. (full story)

First of all, this was the report that all those hawks (both of the chicken variety and otherwise) were telling us would neutralize all the critics of the war who said there were no WMD. Whoops!

Secondly, keep in mind: David Kay and his team have had a significantly longer period of time to look for WMD in Iraq than Hanx Blix and his U.N. team did. If we can't find anything at all, with all the people we have on the ground there, that really says something.

And in case another troll comes back and tells me that we should be looking for them in Syria or Lebanon, riddle me this: How can backers of the war simultaneously say that 1) our steamrolling of Saddam's regime would scare neighboring countries into reforms and less hostile relations with us, and 2) Syria and Lebanon would happily take banned Iraqi weapons -- all of them, apparently -- into their countries. That don't wash.