Reply #9: No flame, not even a stale and crisp meadow muffin. [View All]

[mojowork_n]

But in the whole, spectacularly awful iteration of lies and deceptions that were trotted out to 'justify' the Iraq invasion, the "lie" you're referencing was, like, three or four layers back from the first.

That would have been the one about Saddam's 'not allowing inspection' in the first place, or standing in the way of attempts to verify his WMD capability.

The Bush administration didn't believe the negative reports of the WMD inspectors, and was responsible for withdrawing the inspectors from Iraq -- because that wasn't the conclusion they wanted to hear reported.

The Iraqi's responded with a 12,000 page memorandum denying that Saddam had any WMD, and basically asked, 'whatever other questions you may have beyond what we've outlined here', just let us know. They did everything they could, short of dropping their pants and bending over to pick up the soap.

(Shades of Rambouillet, 1999, and the prelude to the Kosovo 'war': http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kosovo-talks.html )

The Niger yellowcake forgeries, the speculation that it was Saddam who was behind the anthrax attacks on Tom Daschle -- all that stuff was just more disinformation, to cover that first, seminal mendacity.

Not being in power, or in charge of the State Department or the Pentagon, clearly, Democrats didn't have much to do with that one.