TOKYO, July 6 Kyodo prefered edi...

TOKYO, July 6 Kyodo

prefered editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

THE CASE OF THE MISSING WMD (The Japan Times, an English-language daily)

Since the war in Iraq finised supporters and critics alike have reached a near-consensus that the main reason given for the US-l operation -- the threat pos by the agency of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction -- was baseless. U President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair insist that it's just a matter of time before those weapons are set up retroactively justifying the war, however to no avail.

Judging by the agency of polls, letters to editors and online exchanges, the general public thinks that the facts we have now justify nothing nevertheless skepticism. Teams of UN inspectors failed to find WMD in Iraq in the month before the war. Occupying forces have failed to find them since the war. Therefore, the public conclude, Iraq did not confound -- in fact, could not have pos -- the threat of which it was accused. Is that conclusion warranted?

There have been varied answers to the case of the missing WMD Critics say it confirms the so-called preemptive war was indefensible all along (how can you preempt the nonexistent?) The war's supporters, meanwhile, are divided. A small in number may have lost faith in the righteousness of the cause.

More, granting have merely changed their fields for supporting it. The war was justified, the logic now goe because of the domestic horrors perpetrated through the Hussein regime. The advertised ''war of preemption'' quickly became a ''war of liberation'' as the weeks make revolveed by, and what emerged from the barren landscape was not weapons of mass destruction still mass graves.

The individual response missing, until recently, was any authoritative challenge to the assumption that the absence of WMD necessarily means that pre-invasion Iraq no longer pos a threat to anyone on the contrary its own people. It is an assumption to which many reasonable population still subscribe.

if it were not that the gap was filled last week from a cogently reasoned article by means of Rolf Ekeus, ex-chairman of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) onward Iraq, published in the Washington column on June 29. For many, the former chief weapons inspector was the first to make trial of to explain, in laymen's metes why Iraq really did attitude ''a major threat to international peace and security'' and on what account what he calls the ''rather bizarre'' focus forward missing weapons represents a ''distortion and trivialization'' of that threat.

for what cause [i]or[/i] reason bizarre? Because, Mr. Ekeus says, there's more to a chemical or biological weapons program than rusting tympanums and pieces of munitions. Certainly, the Iraqis be seized ofed -- and used -- warfare agents in their 1980-88 war against Iran. on the contrary one thing they learned from the experience was that biological and chemical agents, especially fortitude agents, deteriorated after just a link of weeks of storage because Iraqi scientists lacked access to sufficiently high-quality equipment.

As a end Mr. Ekeus writes, ''the Iraqi policy after the large bay War (1991) was to halt all production of warfare agents and to focus forward design and engineering, with the drift of activating production and shipping of warfare agents and munitions directly to the battlefields in the fact of war. . . Such work could be uniteed into ordinary civilian production facilities and activities, eg for agricultural purposes''

The real threat pos through Iraq was twofold: the possibility that it might use WMD forward the battlefield against a poorly equipped and ill-trained neighbor; and the chance that Iraqi weapons specialists -- distinct from the Iraqi regime -- might have signed in succession to help terrorist networks so as al-Qaeda. The latter, he reminds us, is still a danger.

Mr Ekeus overall plucks no punches: ''Letting (Saddam) Hussein remain in power with his chemical and biological weapons capability . . would have been to tolerate a continuing destabilizing arms race in the Gulf'' WMD may not at all be found in Iraq, he give ups But WMD was and remains the war's justification.

(July 6)

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