We have found no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda
Lie # 1. Anyway, big deal, AQ has connections to ALL of the countries over there.
and no evidence that Iraq had an extensive weapons of mass destruction program, particularly one that was about to go nuclear.
Two modifiers, "extensive" and "particularly." "Extensive" - in other words, there was one, how does one gloss it over? Call it non-extensive, whatever that means. "Particularly" - somewhere in the bowels of the DNC agitprop committee they've decided to pretend Bush emphasized nuclear over biological and chemical, a quasi-straw man argument to be torn down. Guys like this writer fall for propaganda while declaiming other's propaganda.
It is true that Saddam was a beast with an appalling human rights record, but as bad as he was - or is - that was not the reason the administration gave for going to war.
Actually, Bush gave this often as a reason for war. There was many reasons. I would like to believe that some well-intentioned people simply misread the intelligence data and concluded what they already thought they knew - namely, that Saddam posed such a grave threat to American security that he had to be dealt with pronto.
"Pronto" - 12 years after 1991, 2 years after Bush first announced the "war." Heck, back in 1998 Clinton and Congress enacted the overthrow of Saddam as law of the US. If there was merely an intelligence failure, it was massive and inexcusable.
Even the French thought Saddam had the weapons.