[andyfox]

Let's assume you're correct about the uranium stockpiles and that they could have been used for weapons production. Still, we knew their nuclear weapons development program was moribund. From this, Bush conjures a mushroom cloud over America. Quite a stretch.

Bush on finding the WMDS: Interview of the President by TVP, Poland, 2003-05-29:

Q: But, still, those countries who didn't support the Iraqi Freedom operation use the same argument, weapons of mass destruction haven't been found. So what argument will you use now to justify this war?

THE PRESIDENT: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.

The "mobile labs" didn't exist. Two truck trailers were indeed found. Neither had biological agents in them. The equipment in them was used to make hydrogen for weather balloons. The information that there were mobile weapons labs was given to the U.S. by the agent named "curveball," who had already been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar.

As for the "good police work," In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one. As early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan. When Rumsfeld was told we needed to bomb Afghanistan, he responded that there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq.

According to Richard Clarke: "The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

On September 15, Wolfowitz presented the argument, at Camp David, that the U.S. should attack not Afghanistan, but rather Saddam Hussein. James Woolsey said Iraq should be the target, ""no matter who should be responsible" for 9/11. This wasn't police work.

Really, I'm astounded that people still deny that the administration oversold their case. All administrations do this when going to war. Powell's UN presentation was an embarrassment, but no more so than, say, the State Department White Paper on Vietnam issued in 1964 when Johnson was planning to go to war.

Bush is the president who took us to war. The buck stops with him. The Dems who gave him the go-ahead are also disgusting. I'm not a Democratic partisan, I haven't supported or voted for one in quite some time. I've posted here about Kennedy's Chappaquidick lies, Kerry's horrible campaign, what a poor choice Edwards was for VP because he's an empty suit, what a horrible leader Harry Reid is, what disgusting peoples John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were, on Bill Clinton's pathological lies, etc.