The American Prospect
by Matthew Yglesias

11/15/05

Grant President Bush one thing: There is a whiff of hypocrisy about Democratic senators and representatives who favored the Iraq War complaining that the president distorted intelligence findings to sell the war to the public. That the biggest and most important of Bush's deceptions -- that Saddam Hussein was likely to give a nuclear bomb or other mass-casualty device to al-Qaeda -- was a deception was well-understood among those who cared to inform themselves about the matter beforehand. The administration's more subtle manipulation of the WMD intelligence was less obvious at the time, but an inquisitive member of Congress could have gotten a fairly clear picture of things were he or she interested in doing so. A staple of Bush's pre-war rhetoric was simply to exploit the ambiguity inherent in the term 'weapons of mass destruction.' Speeches would glide from intelligence regarding Saddam's chemical weapons programs to the threat of nuclear weapons, with 'WMD' serving as a convenient but essentially meaningless bridge...

http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=10620


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp