"ONLY IF":

Can the 'Bush Lied' Deniers Handle the Truth? (David Corn, 3/17/10, Politics Daily)

et's get down to it. Wehner rests much of his case on a classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a summation of the intelligence community's assessments. It stated,

We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of U.N. resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons, as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions. If left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.

This NIE was, of course, wrong. Iraq had no active WMD programs, no stockpiles. But Wehner and others point to it as a holy writ that justifies everything Bush, Dick Cheney, and other administration officials said. Which is odd, because the Bush White House admitted after the war began that Bush had not bothered to read the entire 93-page document. Had he done so, he would have seen that the report contained important caveats regarding key aspects of the case -- particularly Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein was actively pursing nuclear weapons and close to possessing them.

But Bush needed to read the intelligence only if he cared about presenting a bound-by-the-facts argument.

Mr. Corn is obliquely right: W didn't care about the WMD, only about removing the regime.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 17, 2010 5:44 AM