Old WMD are meaningless

To the editor:

Readers should not be fooled by the recent letter regarding WMD in Iraq. The writer regards it as a revelation that approximately 500 weapons have been discovered since 2003. Dr. David Kay, formerly first director of the CIA Iraq Survey Group, testified in June that is "should not be a surprise to anyone that chemical munitions produced in Iraq between 1980 and 1991 have been found there." He dismissed the 500 degraded pre-Gulf War chemical munitions that have recently been reported about in comparison to what is killing Americans every day: The "1980-era chemical munitions have not killed a single American or Iraqi."

Unexploded munitions from the 1916 Battle of the Somme are still being found today. This is true for any battlefield from the last 100 years.

And now this "revelation" about WMD in Iraq must be weighed against this administration's rationale for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. We were told that our national security was in imminent danger from the regime of Saddam Hussein. This danger was biological, chemical and nuclear, and it was heightened by a partnership between Iraq and al-Qaida. All of this rationale is bogus. To use these aging weapons dug from the ground and found in storage from the 1980s to bolster one's belief in the righteousness of the war is also bogus.

I suspect that those who engage in this mind-juggling game are attempting to assuage their guilt regarding the needless loss of our national treasure, human and material.

FRED J. WILLIAMS, Jackson