This article was fascinating, but it irks me to read its assertions over and over that our Senators were hoodwinked.

I consider it a sham, considering that every Senator had to either not trouble themselves to watch C-Span when the UN explained why it did not find the CIA information credible, or had to have utterly disregarded it. Other than the scope of the deception, little has come out in this article that wasn't placed on the table by the UN.

I have long wished that I'd taped it. The basics that I recall are these:

1. The "proof" of WMD being moved around on trucks consisted, not of satellite images, but of hand drawings. That Americans were infuriated by the UN's doubt of our comic-book style "proof" still takes my breath away.

2. The "proof" of yellow cake being sought by Saddam had been quickly determined to be fabricated by the investigative teams in Europe, who were baffled as to how the far more capable CIA in the US had not caught something so obvious. One of several offers of proof of its fabrication, was that the people who had "signed" these forms weren't even IN the offices at the time the forms had supposedly been drawn up, and that there were so many misspellings and typos as to be childish. Further, the signatures were obvious forgeries.

There was more along this line, and all of this was available before the Senators ever agreed to attack Iraq. I hold accountable EVERY Senator, and in particular Clinton, Kerry and Kennedy. They should not have been as gullible as the GOP, who wanted to play "follow our mighty leader".

I will not vote for a presidential candidate that was in the Senate at that time. If they were hoodwinked, they were either more stupid than my husband and I, who knew before we entered Iraq what fairy tales were taking us there, or they were too UNinterested in doing their jobs to bother watching C-Span!

Okay, McGarret50, I'll fire.

Your defense of Bush only works if you are in agreement with the notion of throwing out scientific reasoning, which totally makes sense, if you're a Bush supporter.

While it would be a lot easier just to suggest that you start watching some CSI, thereby learning that when making charges against others it is expected that we do NOT first make the judgment and THEN search for proof to back it up, I'll see if I can't gently explain what we expect of our country's leaders.

If our President asks for intelligence, we hope and trust that what he is asking for is information that he can use in order to make wise judgment calls. We do not expect that he decides what he wants to do, and then calls upon the intelligence community to fabricate that which will allow him to do so.

"Bush had to make a judgment. Do you do nothing in the belief that he doesn't have WMD or do you do something because you think he does? This is how all of history works." What an amusing twist! You quite leave out the one bit of information, which would invalidate your entire claim. And that is ... that Bush chose to not gather intelligence, but to have it fabricated. When intelligence was given him, he refused it.

If that IS the way all of history works, with our leaders first making decisions, and then finding any way they can to validate what they want to do, then we have a system more faulty than I wish to believe.

If Iran chooses to set off a nuclear weapon, it is my belief that the US will be directly responsible for it. Try reading letters from the moderates living in Iran, who have tried in vain to get us to understand that we are in fact destroying the progress they had made.

I shouldn't have bothered shooting at you. Your ammo is as fabricated as Bush's.

The article, unfortunately, doesn't mention some of the facts that should matter.

If even 30% of Americans saw through this scam, having watched C-Span and hearing the UN explain why they couldn't accept our "evidence", since it was not even slightly convincing or accurate, why is it that we keep hearing that our Senators were in the dark?

This article tells us that Bush gave fabricated evidence to our Senators. We know he presented fabricated evidence to the public. So how is it that not even 10% of our Senators knew what 30% of Americans knew?

I find great fault with senators who claim innocence in this. To be innocent, is to have not troubled themselves to do any research on their own, not even to the point of having their own staff do it for them.

Um, Tommy ... Obama wasn't in the Senate at the time of that vote.

thingswesaid, the idea that we have saved lives does not compute. Among the thousands of lives that are attributed to having been taken by Saddam, are included those who died in the Iran-Iraq war, those who took money from the US to try to topple Saddam, those who had tried to assassinate him, and those who were then (like those who ARE NOW) part of fringe radical groups that could not have ever been dealt with in any way except death (which is what we have found and continue to do, ourselves). I do not support Saddam, but wish to point out that his power came from being able to eradicate those who would not succumb to his rule, which is basically what WE are having to do!

Indeed, I find us guilty of the death of every innocent child in Iraq. We opened the borders of Iraq to the radicals that Saddam would have quickly buried.

Saddam was a monster. Iraq has yet to prove that it can exist under any other kind of rule. But we should have known that before we made it so vulnerable.