How does one prove that one does not have what one has destroyed?
The dismantlement and destruction of WMD materials leaves remains that can be examined to verify that it indeed happened.
SInce we cannot prove they have it, and they cannot prove they don't we shall pick and choose from intelligence reports..... to scare people after 9/11 into supporting this war
As Colin Powell correctly stated, its not incumbent upon the international community to prove that Saddam has WMD, its incumbent upon Saddam to prove that he does not.
As the CNN poll already showed, the majority of Americans already supported the use of US military force to remove Saddam from power PRIOR to 9/11.
And since the very intelligence reports we shall pick and choose from do not support action, we shall pick sentences out of context to make our case...
Saddam's non-compliance alone is enough to support military action, and none of the information that was not included in the NIE in 2002 would change the fact that Saddam was a threat that had to be removed. The idea that such information suggested Saddam was not a threat is absurd and would be in total contradiction to everything that the United States intelligence community, US military, 3 different Presidential administrations, intelligence agencies in other countries, and current and previous US military deployments and actions in the region since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
...And we shall promise our congress that we will indeed go through the UN but because we are afraid of the French Veto we shall use a vaguely proposed resolution that scholars can debate forever...it shall be called RES 1441 and it shall give us just enough cover to make war.
The Resolution was not any more vague than the resolution that authorized the use of military force to remove Saddam from Kuwait in 1991.
And this shall ruin our ability to conduct honest foreign policy for years to come. Because even though it was the right thing to do...conducting it dishonestly...will Fuck us for generations.
Well, there are some people out there that passionately believe that. But with NATO conducting its largest military operation in history outside of Europe, less than a decade after it struggled to actually intervene in a conflict within Europe, it appears their beliefs are incorrect. The cherry picking by those opposed to the administration is not going to change the fact that no one lied.