Another oldie but goodie: US speeds tally of Iraq offenses Christian Science Monitor 11/25/02.
As the White House campaign to hang their disastrous decision to go to war in Iraq on their enemies as the CIA proceeds, it will be important to remember how badly the Bush team wanted this war. As this article, also from Nov. 2002, reminds us:
Like a team of trial lawyers, the Bush administration is meticulously preparing the case for war against Saddam Hussein, intent on ensuring that this time he does not get away. ...
So for the next two weeks, administration officials will continue to hammer away at what they see as constituting "material breach" of the UN resolution passed unanimously earlier this month. They will also warn that Hussein's list will of itself begin to determine if there will be war or not.
The process has already begun, with US assertions that Iraqi attacks on allied aircraft patrolling two no-fly zones over the country breach the resolution's demands.
President Bush also said last week, while on what is being seen as a successful support-building trip to Eastern Europe, that an Iraqi list not confessing to weapons possessions would mean Hussein was entering "his final stage with a lie."
It's worth stopping to think about that statement of the President's for a moment. As Bush himself now admits, after we've invaded and occupied Iraq and spent months doing intensive searches, long after Saddam Hussein's regime had ceased to exist, we know that Iraq in fact did not have the claimed "weapons of mass destruction." An Iraqi admission to having WMDs would have been a lie.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a skeptic of weapons inspections, told ABC News that "if a country is determined to fool the inspectors, they can do that." And he told Pentagon correspondents that "regime change" in Iraq continues to be the will of Congress and the policy of the Bush administration.
This is not the way the United States - or any country - should ever go to war.
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