WMD Sham

Stephen Hadley says Bush didn't mislead America regarding Iraq. "We were wrong," he says. Well, anyone with a brain capable of recollecting only the most basic details about the run-up to the war knows that this statement is a smokescreen. The fact that many people (including Clinton, as we are repeatedly reminded) may have thought that WMDs existed inside Iraq is entirely beside the point. So the CW said there were weapons. Hell, we all thought there were weapons. That's why we sent Hans Blix and the rest of the inspectors back into Iraq. Because we all thought that at the very least there was the possibility of Saddam possessing nukes. Because if we're going to go to war because of weapons, you'd like to make sure they're actually there. But when word came down from the crack team that nothing was there to be found, Bush promptly discredited their mission and sent in the troops anyway. See, the whole weapons sham was just the cover page on the "Let's Go To War" marketing brochure that the White House was passing around. Nothing more. It didn't matter one bit whether they were there or not there. The WMD issue conveniently and perfectly bridged the gap between scary and plausible. It wasn't so much that he manipulated intelligence, even though he did, but that the intelligence, true or false, had practically no bearing on Bush's decision to invade. The WMDs were a selling point for the war, but it wasn't the reason. Saddam was going down, weapons or no weapons, and no one's report of Iraq as a nuclear-free zone was going to stop it. Truth is, we'll never know exactly why we went to war. Probably all the different players had their own reasons, whether selfish or selfless or somewhere in between.