“David Frum also argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - we just don’t acknowledge them. He isn’t always wrong.”
Name the genius making the decision to not acknowledge the WMD in Iraq?
Perhaps more than other factor, this decision opened the doorway to Bush’s decline in approvals, and the four year drumbeat about Iraq, etc.
Name the genius. Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Card, Rove?
There wasn't anything that could not be debated by the liberal press.
I'll give examples from my imperfect memory. We found and examined mobile labs, photos of which Powell had used as evidence. They could have been used to make biological weapons in the field, or they could have been used to fill balloons with hydrogen. Guess what our press concluded? We found more than 500 shells containing chemical warheads. Sounds like a stockpile to me - but not to the press. They hadn't been found in one place. These were “old” rounds that preceded some agreements, blah blah blah. We found hundreds (thousands?) of tons of uranium that could be used for warheads or dirty nukes. So what? Asks the press. Saddam was allowed some uranium. It's a matter of how much, and when he bought it. We found an incredible amount of pesticides at military facilities. Even if all these barrels were properly and honestly labeled, real pesticides are excellent precursor materials for nerve agents to be used against humans. We found uniforms for soldiers to protect them when they used biological and chemical weapons. A few Iraqi scientists volunteered rare, active, dangerous, biological agents that they were told to hide in their home refrigerators. None of this mattered to our one party press.
The press would never find a smocking gun, no matter how clear the evidence. The press determines the topic and the ground-rules for debate. They chose WMD stockpiles, and they chose rules that made WMDs non-existent.
WMDs were only one of the many the reasons why both the Clinton and Bush administrations, and successive Congresses, decide that we should depose and try Saddam Hussein. Clinton gave peace a chance and he failed. Bush realized that war was the answer and he succeeded.
Bush and company should have spent more time cleaning up the historical record. It seemed like they were always ready to move on, leaving it up to "history" and other impartial pundits to set the record straight. Maybe they will be vindicated in 50 to 100 years.