Beyond WMD.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Iraq: The U.S. still has unfinished tasks in Iraq. But finding banned weapons to placate the anti-war crowd should be far, far down the list.

The hypocrisy on the left never ceases to astound. Day by day, evidence piles up that the liberation of Iraq was one of the least morally ambiguous armed acts of modern times. No one can sanely deny that the Iraqis are well rid of Saddam Hussein. But some can't get over the fact that the U.S. and its allies, not the sainted United Nations, were the liberators.

Never mind that hundreds of thousands of bodies have been found in Saddam's mass graves. What tips the moral balance for the anti-war critics, and produces loud outrage, is that the U.S. and the British haven't yet found stashes of banned weapons of mass destruction.

In Europe, the anti-American press and politicians scream that the Bush administration and the Blair government hoodwinked the U.S. and U.K. into fighting an illegitimate war. Here in the U.S., the attack on the administration's credibility is a bit more subtle, with clucking about intelligence failures and the allegedly politicized analysis at the Pentagon. The object of the game is to catch the administration in a lie, real or imagined, so that the legitimacy of Iraq's liberation itself can be called into doubt.

The truth is that the search for WMD, less than eight weeks after the fall of Baghdad, hasn't been wholly fruitless. Last week, for instance, it turned up a pair of trucks equipped with fermenters -- just what would be expected in a mobile bioweapons lab.

A complete scouring of a ...