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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Historians will write for decades about the false fear foisted upon 
trusting Americans to condition them for the Iraq invasion. Some will 
remember but American voters will mostly forget the deception, attributing 
it to business as usual, mentally throwing up their hands. Bush supporters 
will say he was misled by his advisors. His advisors will say they did the 
best they could, that they needed more millions to do a better job. 
Meanwhile, the president awards the leader of failed intelligence the 
Presidential Medal of Freedom for giving him what he needed to do what he 
wanted to do. For some of us, the lesson is clear. Psychopaths also wear suits.


EDITORIAL

Bulletin: No W.M.D. Found

Published: January 13, 2005

The world little noted, but at some point late last year the American 
search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended.

We will, however, long remember the doomsday warnings from the Bush 
administration about mushroom clouds and sinister aluminum tubes; the 
breathless reports from TV correspondents when the invasion began, 
speculating on when the "smoking gun" would be unearthed; our own failures 
to deconstruct all the spin and faulty intelligence.

The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may have been one of the 
greatest nonevents of the early 21st century, right up there with the 
failure of the world's computers to crash at the end of the last 
millennium. That Y2K scare at least brought us an updated Internet. Fear of 
the nonexistent W.M.D. brought us a war.

Even after most of the sites were searched, the places that had been 
identified in spy photos as sinister weapons-production sites had been 
shown to be chicken coops, and the scary reports about nuclear weapons 
ready to be detonated proved to be the fantasies of feckless intelligence 
analysts, die-hard supporters of the invasion insisted that something would 
turn up. This proves once again the difficulties of debunking hard-held 
convictions: Mr. Bush did such a good job selling the weapons-hunting 
nostrum that 40 percent of Americans recently said the weapons were there.

The fact that nothing was found does not absolutely, positively prove that 
there wasn't something there once, something that was disassembled and 
trucked over the border to Syria or buried in yet another Iraqi rose 
garden. But it's not the sort of possibility you'd want to fight a war 
over. What all our loss and pain and expense in the Iraqi invasion has 
actually proved is that the weapons inspections worked, that international 
sanctions - deeply, deeply messy as they turned out to be - worked, and 
that in the case of Saddam Hussein, the United Nations worked. Whatever the 
Hussein regime once had is gone because the international community 
insisted. It was all destroyed a decade ago, under world pressure.

This is not a lesson that many people in power in Washington are prepared 
to carry away, but it is what the national adventure in the reckless 
doctrine of preventive warfare has to teach us.

The findings issued last fall by the Iraq Survey Group, which concluded 
that the W.M.D. threat did not exist in Iraq when Mr. Bush decided to go to 
war, will apparently stand as its final conclusions. The Washington Post 
reported that the leader of the search team, Charles Duelfer, is working on 
some additions that will be included when the report is published in book 
form, but quoted an intelligence official as saying there was "no 
particular news" in the extra material. The 1,200 military men and women 
who were assigned to his search team are now fighting Iraqi insurgents. We 
hope they succeed. If they do not, large swaths of Iraq could become a no 
man's land, where terrorists will be free to work on W.M.D. projects and 
United Nations weapons inspectors cannot go to thwart them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/opinion/13thur1.html