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Wednesday, December 3, 2008 12:00 AM

The buck stops where?

Our delusional president laments the "intelligence failure" that identified nonexistent WMD in Iraq and admits he was "unprepared" for war.

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  • Wednesday, December 3, 2008 07:53 PM

    A couple of nits to pick

    In your understandable desire to stomp on Bush, I think you're letting an awful lot of other politicians off easy. There's a kernel of truth to Bush's whining that he was one of many people fooled by the intelligence (or in some cases joining in on the fraud). The leaders who strongly denounced the evidence for Hussein's WMD programs were mostly on the fringes. The ones that counted found at least some elements of Powell's U.N. presentation credible. Recall the brouhaha over Chirac saying he didn't find Powell "indisputable" (as opposed to actually disputing Powell's claims) and the ongoing chorus of ex-Clinton-ites (and Clinton) saying until fairly recently that they thought Saddam had weapons programs and ambitions, just not very effective ones.

    Also, it's not the case that Hans Blix said in late 2002 and early 2003 that Iraq had no weapons programs; in fact his reports prior to the invasion said that Iraq was out of compliance with the U.N. resolutions and had failed to account for numerous weapons, sites, materials, etc. I distinctly remember him refusing to state directly whether he thought there were active, productive weapons programs in Iraq until AFTER the invasion revealed that there were none.

    All in all, a very large portion of major political figures around the world believed that Iraq had WMD programs. What separated the willing from the unwilling was the view that invasion was the wrong course of action for controlling Saddam's WMD-lust. Bush is a fraud and a criminal, but one with many, many accomplices.

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