Still waiting for one of you lawyers and really smart people to provide one shred of evidence that Bush illegally controlled the intel the Congress got. And while you are at it provide the evidence how he got Clintons and other leading democrats to say the same thing, how he brainwashed everyone in Europe starting in 1991.
I won't hold my breath though.
If Bush's intel was so reliable, why did Colin Powell first claim that that Iraq was so weak Saddam couldn't even threaten his neighbors with conventional weapons. Why did they never explain how Iraq grew from a weakling under Clinton to a major threat under Bush?
We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.
Colin Powell's press remarks, Cairo, Egypt on February 24, 2001
Subsequent events proved Powell's original assessment to be correct. Clinton acknowledged that Saddam was a problem at one time, but he dealt with that successfully with sanctions. Committing to war after the enemy threat had vanished is the epitome of a dumb war, and a tragic waste of 4,000 America lives.