Salon -- Allies angry over missing WMDs

Since the Iraq war began and no evidence was immediately found to back up Vice President Dick Cheney's Aug. 26 pronouncement that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," the administration has been back-pedaling. In his April interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw, for instance, President Bush lowered the bar, indicating that the U.S. was looking for evidence not of the weapons themselves but that despot Saddam Hussein "had a weapons of mass destruction program." The same day as the Brokaw interview, at an Abrams Army Tank plant in Lima, Ohio, Bush noted that "whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth."

This has sufficed for those like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., of the alleged opposition party, who told NBC on May 11 that he doesn't think the failure to find WMD would be damaging to U.S. credibility. "I think we've got to recognize that there were more than one goal here," Daschle said, as if reading from White House talking points. "One of the other goals was to remove a threat to this country, to remove a threat to the region, to remove a person who not only repressed and tortured his own people but clearly posed some serious problems throughout the world."

Something is not right with Daschle.