To the editor:

In his Sunday column, Leonard Pitts writes the following: “…the wheels began to come off the Bush administration’s argument for invading Iraq, i.e., to find the weapons of mass destruction. But of course, there were no such weapons, an inconvenient truth to which Team Bush responded with a new, after-the-fact rationale. Now, the argument for war was and always had been the need to free the poor, suffering Iraqi people.”

First, as noted by the New York Times last October, WMDs were found in Iraq. Of course, Pitts would argue that these were “old” WMDs. That may be the case. However, in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions, Saddam Hussein was required to destroy ALL of his WMDs. If he failed to do that, isn’t it likely that he failed to destroy newer WMDs as well? There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that Saddam sent WMDs to Syria prior to the invasion. There is precedent for this since Saddam sent most of his air force to Iran prior to Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

As far as the after-the-fact rationale, the Bush administration cited several rationales before the invasion. WMDs was one. However, freeing the Iraqi people was also a major rationale cited prior to the invasion. Pitts may have forgotten that the operation to remove Saddam from power was called Operation Iraqi Freedom.