The “Bush lied/People died” chant flourished for years as the Left demonized George W. Bush for invading Iraq and finding “no” weapons of mass destruction. Except that our troops did discover vast numbers of chemical WMDs, but the administration kept the discovery -- and the injuries to our troops that handled them -- secret.

The existence of the slur-busting weapons remained largely unknown to the public (but known to AT readers) until the New York Times published a front page story Wednesday, only a day after the New York Post revealed that ISIS fighters had taken over territory where these WMDs were stored. To be sure, these were old weapons, as my colleague Rick Moran is quick to point out, but they remain evidence of Saddam’s WMD programs and stockpiles.

So what genius decided to keep these WMD stockpiles secret? Eli Lake of The Daily Beast reports:

 Starting in 2004, some members of the George W. Bush administration and Republican lawmakers began to find evidence of discarded chemical weapons in Iraq. But when the information was brought up with the White House, senior adviser Karl Rove told them to “let these sleeping dogs lie.”

Rove insisted that Bush not respond to his fierce critics during his presidency, allowing their slurs to become received wisdom, not just on WMDs but in general. (snip)

Dave Wurmser—who served at the time as a senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney on national-security issues—remembers receiving a similar message from Rove.

According to Wurmser, “in 2005-6, Karl Rove and his team blocked public disclosure of these (findings) and said ‘Let these sleeping dogs lie; we have lost that fight so better not to remind anyone of it.’”

Rove declined to comment for this story.

At least part of the Bush administration’s case against Saddam Hussein was based on the fact that he never properly accounted for the chemical-weapons stockpile he had built up in the 1980s. AsSantorum himself said during his 2006 press conference, the Pentagon’s report at the time “proves that weapons of mass destruction are, in fact, in Iraq.”