I must confess to a mounting impatience with the advocates of the president's war policy who now seem zealously intent on short-circuiting any serious debate about the rationale for the war by denying, obfuscating or simply lying about the premises of the very debate itself. ...
The president's defenders want to frame the argument like this: the president said there was WMD; his critics said there was WMD. If he's wrong, everybody was wrong. If there was a 'plot' to deceive the American people, as Kagan would have it, even the president's critics were in on the plot. So what kind of plot would that be? This is just a head-fake with an advanced degree and it's deeply dishonest.
The public didn't get sold on this war because Saddam had nerve gas, or botulinum or even anthrax. True or not, a lot of people believed that. (I believed it -- and I still have a very hard time believing Saddam doesn't have chemical munitions stored somewhere.) The public got sold on the war because the administration argued consistently and vociferously that Saddam was on the brink of amassing far more fearsome weapons -- particularly nuclear weapons ("We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud") and that he had growing operational ties to terrorists to whom he might give these weapons or even some of his less threatening chemical agents.
It was fairly clear before the war that neither of those claims were true. Since the war it has become clearer by the day that they were almost certainly not true.
Those were the imminent threats that made the war necessary in March. No waiting for inspections, no building up of alliances, nothing. There was an imminent threat and countries respond militarily to imminent threats.
The only thing that's pretty clear is that there was no imminent threat. And there is a growing body of evidence -- much of which was known, frankly, before the war -- that the administration did everything it could to push the claim that there was an imminent threat using what was often very, very weak evidence. I don't think 'lie' is necessarily the best word for it. I think a more apropos analogy is a lawyer's brief. You pull together every piece of evidence you can find -- good, bad, flimsy, obviously bogus, uncertain, it doesn't matter, just throw it all in -- and you make the best case you can with what you have. You put in everything that helps your case and forget about everything that hurts it. And the case was that there was an imminent threat that required war against Iraq. I repeat, imminent....
The fact is that the administration and its advocates are now doing everything they can to run away from a year's worth of arguments about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Quoting one of their patron saints, conservatives are often fond of saying that 'ideas have consequences.' Lies do too.

The only people claiming he had tons of anthrax and liters of VX and even a nuclear program was the US. That's the issue at stake. e, and to a lesser extent, the UK, Israel and maybe Russia, are the only people who really had a good eye into Iraq. Everyone else in the UN, from the inspectors down to the lowliest delegate, had to rely on what a few countries told them. The only data the UN had was four or five years out of date and certainly incomplete. We had the intelligence assets to know as much, and probably more, than the rest of the UN combined. That gave us a certain credibility. So when George Bush starts talking about liters of VX, the rest of the world is going to listen. They're going to believe, at the very least, that Saddam's got something, because the President of the US has got the CIA and the NSA and God knows what else to tell him about it. Britain and Israel agreed with us, but that doesn't mean a whole lot. For one, both of them rely heavily on our intel data (although Israel certainly has it's own pipes into Iraq. I don't remember them adding much, though). Secondly, Blair and Sharon had as big a desire to sell this war as Bush did. It wasn't just the American public that was relying on the US' intelligence stream. It was the entire world. And with the entire world listening, George Bush and his pals got up there and pushed data that was false, pushed data that wasn't credible, and pushed explanations that had far more to do with wishful thinking and desired results than objective analysis. Yes, Bush lied completely about the nature of the threat. He lied and exaggerated and overstated and did everything he could to make it look Saddam was already planning how to nuke us or disperse VX in our cities. But he also lied about there being a threat at all. With the data he had available, with the data now coming public, the best US intel could say is that Saddam might have some chemical weapons left, and probably nothing too nasty at that. There certainly was nothing reliable that he was building a nuke program (That was lie start to finish) or that he was rebuilding his chemical or biological programs. Which made the claim that Saddam was more dangerous today than at any point in the last decade a lie as well. But claiming that because the rest of the world believed Saddam had weapons means it wasn't a conspiracy is disingenuous at best. They believed he had weapons because we kept saying it. Over and over and over.

Kagan quotes vast numbers of people who had similar impressions of Hussein's alleged weapons. There's a lot of "strong evidence" and "it is likely" and "we think." Which is fine. The problem is, not one of these people claimed to know the specific type, quantity, and location of these chemical and biological weapons. And none of these people ordered the illegal invasion of another country. George W. Bush did both of these things, which puts him on the hook for proving his claims.
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I still want to know -- if they're not lying -- why we're seeing such complacency from the White House.
If the intelligence apparatus of the US misled them so grievously, they're clearly a danger to US national security, and many heads should be rolling. Yet the White House doesn't seem concerned. If the intelligence community was right and the WMD are missing, why don't we have tens of thousands of people on the ground in Iraq trying to make sure that they're not making their way to al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, or the like? But all we get is reassurances that "we'll find"...something. It just doesn't seem to add up.
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These guys are playing Calvin Ball and moving the goalposts after the fact. Very few people before the war argued that there weren't WMDs. The French and Germans and virtually every other foreign country that opposed us didn't. What they DID argue was whether the threat was IMMINENT and whether the inspectors should be allowed to complete their work. To ignore the "IMMINENT THREAT" argument and pretend that something else was being argued is duplicitous at the extreme. This whole episode illustrates the moral bankruptcy of Bush's "pre-emptive war" doctrine where we can invade a sovereign country, slaughter thousands of innocent civilians and then attempt to come up with marketable and shifting reasonings for the invasion after the fact. It's no wonder the rest of the world hate's Bush's and our guts.
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Two things can be simultaneously true:
1) Many Democrats agreed that Hussein possessed WMD and posed an imminent threat to US security...and
2) The Bush administration lied about it...
Just as...
1)Many Republicans agreed that the North Vietnamese attacked the US in August 1964...and
2)The Johnson administration lied about it...
Is there something new here?