WMD: If you listen to media reports, you might think it's now proven there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war. You might be very wrong.
 
    The media seem bent on declaring there are no WMD in Iraq. That may be. But that doesn't mean they were never there. Evidence is strong that, at a minimum, Iraq had WMD before the U.S. invaded. It may still have them.
 
    As yet, there is no "smoking gun" -- nothing that would point incontrovertibly to a stockpile of weapons.
 
    For that you must, as pundits like to say, connect the dots. A number of recent events are highly suggestive that Iraq's WMD existed. And that neighboring Syria has had a hand in hiding them.
 
    The U.N.'s oil-for-food scandal, which skimmed money from Iraq oil sales from 1996-2002 for Saddam Hussein's personal use, is one of those events. Charles Duelfer, the former U.S. diplomat who now heads the search for WMD in Iraq, says there's evidence Saddam used the billions he stole to finance his WMD program.
 
    So why haven't the weapons been found in Iraq?
 
    There's a growing intelligence consensus they were shipped abroad, either to Syria -- a fellow Baathist regime -- or to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, which is under Syrian control. Or perhaps even Iran.
 
    This is more than speculation.
 
    Three months before the war began, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned Israelis that intelligence showed Iraq was moving large amounts of military material into Syria.

This week, Israeli Lt. General Moshe Yaalon, Israel's military chief, told an Israeli newspaper his nation's intelligence concluded Iraq had chemical weapons and the means to deliver them before the war.
 
    Nor has Syria's possible role gone unnoticed by others. Last year, when former chief weapons inspector David Kay delivered his report on Iraq, he said it was likely that the weapons had existed, but that they were shipped somewhere else -- most likely, again, Syria.
 
    Moreover, just last week, Jordan uncovered a planned chemical attack on its capital, Amman, by al-Qaida. The Jordanian government estimated more than 80,000 people would have been killed if the attack had gone forward.
 
    And where did the vehicles containing chemical weapons and poison gas, both WMD, come from? Syria. Indeed, Syria seems to become more deeply implicated by the day as a WMD source.
 
    That's not all. Sudan's President Omar Bashir, whose troubled nation in the Horn of Africa has been used as a terrorist staging ground by al-Qaida and other extremist groups, has ordered Syria to remove its Scud ballistic missiles and chemical weapons now stored in Khartoum. For the record, those are WMD.
 
    Syria is up to other mischief, as well. Last week, the U.S. accused Syria's Baathist regime of "facilitating" the infiltration of foreign terrorists into Iraq.
 
    Like they say, connect the dots. In addition to massive evidence of an Iraqi weapons program already found by U.S. and U.N. inspectors, there's growing evidence that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are still waiting to be found -- either buried deep in the Iraqi desert, or in Syria.

    Jordanian authorities say that the death toll from a bomb and poison-gas attack they foiled this month could have reached 80,000. We guess the fact that most major media are barely covering this story means WMD isn't news anymore until there's a body count.
 
    Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the man cited by the Bush Administration as its strongest evidence of prewar links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and the current ringleader of anti-coalition terrorism in Iraq -- may be behind the plot, which would be al Qaeda's first ever attempt to use chemical weapons. The targets included the U.S. Embassy in Amman. Yet as of yesterday, most news organizations hadn't probed the story, if at all, beyond the initial wire-service copy.
 
    Perhaps the problem here is that covering this story might mean acknowledging that Tony Blair and George W. Bush have been exactly right to warn of the confluence of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Jordan's King Abdullah called it a "major, major operation" that would have "decapitated" his government. "Anyone who doubts the terrorists' desire to obtain and use these weapons only needs to look at this example," said Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
 
    More details of the plot emerged Monday night with the dramatic broadcast on Jordanian television of confessions from the terror cell's leader and associates. The idea apparently was to crash trucks -- fitted with special battering rams and filled with some 20 tons of explosives -- through the gates of targets that included the U.S. Embassy, the Jordanian Prime Minister's office and the national intelligence headquarters. The explosions notwithstanding, the real damage was reportedly to come from dispersing a toxic cloud of chemicals, which included nerve and blister agents.
 
    Anonymous U.S. officials have been quoted playing down the WMD wrinkle, suggesting the chemicals may have been meant to merely amplify a conventional explosion.

But then much of our "intelligence" bureaucracy is still wedded to the discredited notion that secular tyrants and fundamentalist terrorists don't cooperate (see Hezbollah). They may also be defensive about their earlier, dismissive assessments of Zarqawi's significance.
 
    Plotter Hussein Sharif Hussein was shown on Jordanian television saying the aim was "carrying out the first suicide attack to be launched by al Qaeda using chemicals." A Jordanian scientist described a toxic cloud that could have spread for a mile or more. So was it really a foiled WMD attack? Here's hoping someone is trying to get to the bottom of this.
 
    The provenance of the operation is also of note. The bomb trucks and funds are said to have entered Jordan via Syria. Last fall General James R. Clapper Jr., director of satellite intelligence for the Pentagon, said there had been an unusual amount of traffic -- including possibly WMDs -- between Iraq and Syria in the lead-up to war.
 
    The terror cell's ringleader, Jordanian Azmi Jayyousi, said he was acting on the orders of Zarqawi, whom he first met at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan: "I took courses, poisons high level, then I pledged allegiance to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." Mr. Jayyousi said this attack had been plotted from Zarqawi's new base of operations in Iraq. A Jordanian court sentenced Zarqawi to death this month for plotting the 2002 murder of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman.
 
    Prime Minister Blair has said it's simply "a matter of time unless we act and take a stand before terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together." According to Jordanian authorities, that sometime was intended to be last week. That strikes us as news.