This article has been up for a while, but I just found it via a link from Christopher Hitchens in Slate. The author, Rolf Ekeus, was the head of UNSCOM from 1991-1997, and now runs the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He explains the nature of the Iraqi WMD program, why stocks of chemical weapons are hard to find, and what Saddam intended to do with the weapons. Unlike fellow Swede Hans Blix, Ekeus supports the invasion:
The chemical and biological warfare structures in Iraq constitute formidable international threats through potential links to international terrorism. Before the war these structures were also major threats against Iran and internally against Iraq’s own Kurdish and Shiite populations, as well as Israel.
The Iraqi nuclear weapons projects lacked access to fissile material but were advanced with regard to weapon design. Here again, competition with Iran was a driving factor. Iran, as a major beneficiary of the fall of Hussein, has now been given an excellent opportunity to rethink its own nuclear weapons program and its other WMD activities.
The door is now open for diplomatic initiatives to remake the region into a WMD-free area and to shape a structure in the Persian Gulf of stability and security. Moreover, the defeat of the Hussein regime, a deadly opponent to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, has opened the door to a realistic and re-energized peace process in the Middle East.
This is enough to justify the international military intervention undertaken by the United States and Britain. To accept the alternative — letting Hussein remain in power with his chemical and biological weapons capability — would have been to tolerate a continuing destabilizing arms race in the gulf, including future nuclearization of the region, threats to the world’s energy supplies, leakage of WMD technology and expertise to terrorist networks, systematic sabotage of efforts to create and sustain a process of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the continued terrorizing of the Iraqi people.
This is powerful stuff and it deserves a lot of play.