Bush bullied CIA in order to dupe us
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/opinion/bookman/2004/020504.html The latest line from Secretary of State Colin Powell and others is that the Iraq war was such a just cause that we would have invaded even if we had known beforehand that no weapons of mass destruction existed.
To some, that might sound like a feeble effort to downplay a massive intelligence failure. I think it's more than that. I think it's the truth.
In effect, the Bush administration is now admitting that WMD were never the reason for the war. They chose to invade Iraq not to protect us from anthrax or nuclear attack, but because they hoped that an invasion would inspire new respect for U.S. power and would allow us to use Iraq as a base from which to transform the entire Arab world.
In the fall of 2002, however, administration officials recognized that honesty was not the best policy. Americans would never support an unprovoked war based on some grandiose ambition and dubious strategic benefit. If Bush officials wanted war, they needed to terrorize the American public into supporting it, and they seized upon the CIA's assessment of Iraqi WMD as the perfect tool for achieving that goal.
But first, the intelligence agencies had to be whipped into playing along.
"Frankly,
have worked," Powell told an Egyptian press conference. " has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."
To get its war, the administration had to transform what it knew to be a minor, contained annoyance into a threat big enough to scare the American people. The solution it hit upon was ingenious: They fabricated a link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.
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