Does Al Qaeda have WMDs?

Kos (www.dailykos.com) has a really interesting idea:

[Bush's joke about missing WMDs] gives Kerry an excellent chance to do what few if any Democrats have done--ask George W. Bush if he's concerned that Al Quada has Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Most of us accept that whatever weapons of mass destruction that Saddam had at the end of the Gulf war in 1991 either atrophied or were destroyed....Thanks to Joe Wilson and others, we know that there was no operational nuclear program in Iraq. But despite all that, the White House insists that the weapons existed.

So, Kerry should call Bush's bluff. Especially in a week in which Richard Clarke shot a torpedo through the hull of the S.S. Reelect Shrub, Kerry should exploit this opportunity by playing along with the assumption that there were WMD in Iraq a year ago, and we've lost the WMD. For rhetorical purposes, don't play it like the U.S. forces in Iraq cannot find the WMD, frame the attack as if the weapons that Bush said were in Iraq are no longer there and have apparently been lost to Al Queda.

Clarke's revelations are damaging because they depict Bush and his White House as lacking any interest in, or sense of urgency about, Al Queda and global terrorism. Attacking Bush for apparently letting the terrorists take possession of Saddam's WMD forces Bush into a box from which there is no escape. Bush would have two choices, both bad. He could admit that, despite Colin Powell's testimony before the U.N., we really didn't know of any locations with WMD. Thus, the Iraq war really is the diversionary boondoggle that Clarke and other terrorism experts said it would be. The other option is to stick to his contention that Saddam had massive stockpiles of WMD, and if he does that, Kerry just hammers home that therefore the only plausible conclusion is that the WMD fell out of Iraqi military and civil authority before we could secure them, and now they've been blown by the wind to who knows where. And if people accept that terrorists did get the WMD, Bush's jocularity on the subject of loose WMD fits right into the image painted of him by Richard Clarke.