Yesterday and today I’ve been posting on a New York Times story critical of the Bush administration for releasing nuclear weapons information that were in documents captured after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Personally, I think it’s significant that Saddam Hussein had documents on nuclear weapons that were so advanced that making them publicly available could well have helped Iran get closer to developing their own nuke, implying that what Saddam had was more advanced that what Ahmadinejad has (that we know of).

But a lot of liberals are saying that because the nuclear documents from Iraq pre-date the 1991 Gulf War it isn’t evidence to suggest that Iraq was a threat.  That is such a naive, blinkered view of this situation that I don’t even know where to begin criticizing it.

Let me start with this: We can all agree that Iran is a growing nuclear threat, yes?  The left often points to Iran as being more of a threat than Iraq ever was, yet it turns out that Iraq apparently had nuclear information that was more advanced than what we think Iran has.  That’s significant.  We also know that Iraq, despite the protestations of Joe Wilson, was seeking to buy uranium even in the years just prior to invasion.  That is also significant.

The truth of the matter is that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was every bit the threat to international security that Iran is now.  Saddam had plans for a nuke, was seeking uranium, was sponsoring international terrorism, was working with other international terror organizations and was murdering tens of thousands of his own citizens every year.  The fact that his plans for the nuke are well over a decade old is irrelevant.  Nuclear technology itself is several decades old.

The point is that Saddam was a threat.  That the left wants to downplay that is just more evidence of why leftist leaders and politicians can’t be taken seriously on national security issues.