"Michael McKelvy" wrote in message ...

They were never fully accounted for after the first Gulf War.

I don't know if they had any left or not. I do know that the Intel from
every country in the world indicated that they did. In the UK they have
taken judical notice that the reports were not "sexed up," and heads are
rolling at the BBC.

There are a few choices one can RATIONALLY believe on this issue.

1. Saddam had them and hid them.

2. They used to have them and were trying to get them again.

3. Saddam wanted them again but was being fleeced by his own people.

It is not rational to believe that Bush made up the reports about Iraq's
weapons.

It doesn't matter since President Bush was given the authority by Congress
to do anything he felt necessary to fight the war on terror. No matter how
mcuh spin the idiots on the left try to apply, that fact is not going away.

It was politics that got that vote, since nobody wanted to appear soft on
defense. The Democrats have a long history of being on the wrong side of
every Defense issue brought before them and it is going to kill their
efforts to beat Bush.

Well here's my opinion. No one was certain they had them. There was
evidence pointing to the them having them, but no one saw any pictures
or outright proof of it. The summaries given by the CIA made this
clear, which is why the administration including Bush almost always
couched the accusations in vague and circumspect language: he has
"dangerous weapons," he _had_ "chemical and biological weapons," he is
seeking nuclear weapons, the weapons remain unaccounted for, etc.

On occasion, someone slipped up and said they _knew_ he had WMD.
Rumsfeld in particular said this. What he was thinking was that he
was expressing that as an opinion based on evidence. However, to say
you know something is a statement of certainty, not a statement of
inference. In other words, what he was leaving unsaid was contrary to
what he was saying. In other words, when he said we "know" Saddam has
WMD, he was lying.

So far as I have seen, the closest Bush came to outright lying was
when he said we know Saddam has "dangerous" weapons. Now that can of
course be construed to refer to conventional weapons, but he was
implying WMD. It's not lying outright, but it's deliberately giving a
false impression.

However, his overall effort I think was to mislead the public into
thinking there was an imminent threat of attack from Iraq, and I think
it's accurate to say that that claim was a lie. I think he also tried
to foster the impression that Iraq was behind 9/11, also a lie. These
are lies, but Bush never said them explicitly. He instead tried to
get the public to think them by innuendo and implication. "We don't
want the proof to come in the form of a mushroom cloud," etc.

Cheney I haven't gone over his statements very carefully, but I think
he made some plain statements of knowledge beforehand as well.

I'm not trying to persuade you--I'm sure many people agree with you.
I just wanted to hear what you had to say because it's interesting.

Bush has acceded to an investigation, by the way:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/international/middleeast/01CND-INTE.html?hp