More On Bush's "Lies"

One thing that bothers me about the current argument of whether or not "Bush lied" is that the underlying premise may be wrong.

The argument, as it stands, centers around whether Bush manipulated intelligence in order to bring us into the Iraq War. Many people, on both sides, seem to have accepted the assumption that there were, in fact, no WMDs. The remaining question is only whether Bush knew this prior to toppling Hussein.

As part of Bush's attempts to fight back against the Dem's distortion of history, he shouldn't concede this assumption. Saddam was known to have used chemical weapons. There's also plenty of evidence that he was engaged in developing biologic and nuclear capabilites. The question shouldn't be "Did Bush lie?", or even "How could we have been so wrong?". The question should be "What happened to them?"

This interview, with former weapons inspector Bill Tierney, helps to shift the paradigm of discussions relating to the Iraq war:

"Could the assessments of Iraq’s weapons program been off? I am sure there were some marginal details that were incorrect, but on the matter of whether Iraq had a program, the error was not with the pre-war assessment, the error was with the weapons hunt....

On the post-war weapons hunt, the arrogance and hubris of the intelligence community is such that they can’t entertain the possibility that they just failed to find the weapons because the Iraqis did a good job cleaning up prior to their arrival. This reminds me of the police chief who announced on television plans to raid a secret drug factor on the outskirts of town. At the time appointed, the police, all twelve of them, lined up behind each other at the front door, knocked and waiting for the druggies to answer, as protocol required. After ten minute of toilet flushing and back-door slamming, somebody came to the front door in a bathrobe and explained he had been in the shower. The police took his story at face value, even though his was dry as a bone, then police proceeded to inspect the premises ensuring that the legal, moral , ethnic, human, and animal rights, and also the national dignity, of the druggies was preserved. After a search, the police chief announced THERE WERE NO STOCKPILES of drugs at the inspected site. Anyone care to move to this city? "