Karl Rove, George W. Bush and WMDs
In a NY Times article about Karl Rove’s new book “Courage and Consequences: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight” reporter Peter Baker notes that, according to Rove, former President Bush would not have gone to war in Iraq had there not been weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) there. WOW!
Of course Baker then goes on to show Rove’s speculation that Congress would not have approved (NO KIDDING) and that the administration would have tried “other means” to limit Saddam’s tyranny. REALLY?
For most folks this probably means “case closed”, at best the Bush administration (and the Brits) simply goofed in their intelligence estimates of what was going on in Iraq at the time. BUT, from both sides of the politics there are a couple of chapters remaining to answer a few lingering questions:
“If that was the main reason, what was the rush to war?”
“Who really thought the US could go to war against a biological weapons program that could hide enough force to kill millions of people on the head of a pin or inside the barrel of a pen?”
“How far had Saddam gone with his illegal WMD programs when he threw out the inspectors in 1998 and what happened to those bombs, toxin and bacterial stocks between 1998 and 2003?” Remember that it is a fact that Iraq had admitted a program at the end of the first Gulf War & UN inspectors through at least 1995 had uncovered a rudimentary but significant weapons program.