Even though Iraqis turned out in droves to vote in parliamentary elections, and even though the Obama administration prepares to withdraw the last combat forces from Iraq this summer, opponents of the Iraq war amazingly continue to propagate the myth that the Bush administration led the country to war based on fabricated intelligence. Over at Politics Daily, Pete Wehner has written a detailed rebuttal of this argument as part of an exchange with David Corn.
As someone who spent several years during the second term of the Bush administration working to counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and analyzing Iran’s nuclear weapons program, I have a sense of what those in office in 2003 were going through as they reviewed the intelligence community’s assessments about Iraq. These policymakers were reviewing fragmented intelligence, but the intelligence clearly pointed to one conclusion – Iraq possessing ongoing weapons of mass destruction programs. As Wehner points out, policymakers in the Bush White House were not alone in their belief that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons and harbored nuclear ambitions. Numerous foreign leaders, as well as leading Democrats, such as Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton, reviewed the same intelligence and came to the same conclusions about Saddam’s activities.
