People wonder why Bush didn't make this case after we rolled in there and discovered the empty warehouses.
Easy explanation: if he told the truth about where Saddam sent them, he'd have essentially been admitting that because of his admin's shortsighted and downright idiotic decision to invade, occupy, and nation-build in Iraq, Saddam's WMDs were now in much more dangerous hands -- the Assad regime and Hezbollah. ....probably a good chunk of them right on Israel's northern border. (The Russian Army supervised the move. And as we've seen in the past few years, Assad has put them to use in Syria's civil war).
So rather than tell the truth about their whereabouts and Russian involvement, which would have been admitting gross incompetence (at best), Bush decided to lie and play the "oops, it looks like our intel was wrong about Saddam's WMDs" card. Embarrassing, but less embarrassing and indicting than telling the truth.
Bottom line: contrary to what most people believe, Bush didn't lie about the existence of Saddam's WMDs as a pretext to go to war -- he lied about their whereabouts after the invasion. And it's a crucial distinction. Anyone who thinks Saddam didn't have them is either ignorant or in willful denial. Especially considering the evidence presented in articles like this.
Exactly. Telegraphing that “WE’RE COMING TO GET YOU, REAL SOON!” gave Saddam every chance in the world to dump the WMDs. That was nothing more and nothing less than Galaxy-Class STOOOOOPID.
It was also about pandering to the PC of the day, where national leaders in a free country have to publicly exhaust every remedy for an international problem before resorting to any kind of force - that was and remains massively stupid and short-sighted...not that the radical Left gives a damn, because they have hated this country since the day they became conscious.