Washington Post on the Eroding Case for War Against Iraq
This is an interesting story, mainly because it serves to counter the contention by Bush’s people lately that the infamous “16 words” in the State of the Union address weren’t important, since the war was justified by lots of other evidence. Well, not really, says the article, at least if you’re talking about the Iraqi nuclear program in particular. Since in the days leading up to the speech pretty much every other piece of evidence purpotedly showing that Iraq was actively seeking to restart its nuclear weapons program had been discredited: Bush faced dwindling data on Iraq nuclear bid.
It helps to fill in the gaps on just why the administration would have fought so hard to include such shaky evidence: because they really, really wanted that mushroom cloud image in the State of the Union address. Without it, see, us silly little Americans might have balked at the idea of pre-emptively invading another country. We might have paused and said, hey, wait; this whole UN-inspection thing actually seems to be working.
That would have been a disaster, right? Thank God we avoided that.
