The question of Iraq's WMD programs is not going to be resolved by the war because the honest debate over it was never about whether he had WMD or he had no WMD. It was always about how much WMD he had, what quality and kind he had, and what he would do with it. So most people in the foriegn policy establishment assumes that WMD will be found, but 6 months and a year from now the questions will be about how much was found, what quality they were, why didn't Saddam use the WMD he had at the time of the war, what would he have done with it had we not gone to war with him, and did members of his military or his scientists take some of the WMD or precurser chemicals out of the country before or during the war?
Unfortunately, in the public, which has become so divided and politicized over the justifications of the war, the debate will remain an all or nothing argument in which every bit of evidence will be held as proof of justification while disputed by others. But justification for a war that has already taken place becomes less relevant than the question of what is being done for the people who we "liberated."
So I think the importance of the WMD issue is already fading and the question of reconstruction of Iraq is becoming the main issue now, as it should be.
AJ's article brings up some issues though. For instance, if any of Iraq's WMD was sent over the border to Syria, then that problem can't be treated the same way as Iraq was. Syria is not prohibited from possessing WMD. Iraq was only prohibited from having them as a condition of the 1991 cease fire. No such treaty exists with Syria, and it has not joined the bio/chem weapons treaties. There may some prohibition on recieving them from Iraq, but that will still be a murky issue.
Also, Syria is a part of other important issues. Syria has given us important cooperation with our war against al-Quaeda, and it would be foolish to sacrafice that cooperation. It has not, however, stopped its support for Hammas in Palestine, which we will need to pressuring it to do when/if we turn our attention to the Israel/Palestine issue soon. The foreign policy establishment is pretty much in agreement that, in order to maintain our standing in the Middle East, and to achieve our objective of using a "democratic" Iraq as a tool for bringing reform to the other regimes in the region, the US has to bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the bargaining table. Syria will be a key player in that process. The Bush administration will be pressuring it to stop support for Hammas as part of that process, and to end its own occupation of Lebanon. So the issue of WMD in Syria will not be an isolated one.
As for bio/chem weapons in general, an article in yesterday's WP ,(<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58454-2003Apr19.html" target="_blank">Lethal Legacy: Bioweapons for Sale - U.S. Declined South African Scientist's Offer on Man-Made Pathogens</a>) shows the complexity of the problems of WMD in general. A South African scientist had precurser agents of biological weapons leftover from South Africa's biological weapons program that was supposed to have been completely destroyed by the mid 1990s. He offered to sell them to the US in 1992, but the US declined them after they ferified that they were biological weapons, but were outdated versions that could be reproduced in any advanced laboratory. The guy says he's getting offers from shadowy figured to buy the shit. If the US government chose not to buy this shit just to get it off the market, then that makes me think that there must be alot worse stuff coming out of laboratories nowadays. And assuming that we're not going to go to war with South Africa, there has to be a better way of dealing with this shit.
Also note the sick fucking nature of the pathogens the aparthied regime was trying to develop to sterilize black people in South Africa.