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Sen. Byrd seems to be waging a one-man war against the White House spin machine on the much-hyped WMDs that have failed to materialize in Iraq.

The Perception of Deception: Where Are the Iraqi Weapons?

The fundamental question that is nagging at many is this:  How reliable were the claims of this President and key members of his Administration that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction posed a clear and imminent threat to the United States, such a grave threat that immediate war was the only recourse?

This is the main issue, in my opinion. I do not deny for even a moment that WMDs may eventually turn up in Iraq, but it seems clear at this point that the case Bush was making was incredibly overwrought. We were warned of great dangers, imminent threats, so fearsome that we could not possibly wait any longer to start this war. Now that the war is over, however, it seems like these alleged WMDs are as elusive as Osama bin Laden (which is not to suggest that neither pose a threat, but merely that the Bush administration has done a lousy job of locating both).

What amazes me is that the President himself is not clamoring for an investigation.  It is his integrity that is on the line.  It is his truthfulness that is being questioned.  It is his leadership that has come under scrutiny.

This doesn’t amaze me at all. When has the Bush administration ever clamored for--or even cooperated with--an investigation? Bush’s buddies at Enron? Nope. Cheney’s energy policy? Nope. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? Not without a fight.

In an interview with Polish television last week, President Bush noted that two trailers were found in Iraq that U.S. intelligence officials believe are mobile biological weapons production labs, although no trace of chemical or biological material was found in the trailers.  “We found the weapons of mass destruction,” the President was quoted as saying.  Certainly he cannot be satisfied with such meager evidence.

It is certainly a big step back from the tons of chemical and biological weapons we were warned about, isn’t it? It also seems pretty clear that these so-called “mobile labs” are part of a system used to produce hydrogen for launching artillery balloons, not chemical weapons, as Bush would like to claim.

Who are the American people to believe?  What are we to think?  Even though I opposed the war against Iraq because I believe that the doctrine of preemption is a flawed and dangerous instrument of foreign policy, I did believe that Saddam Hussein possessed some chemical and biological weapons capability.  But I did not believe that he presented an imminent threat to the United States - as indeed he did not.

Here I agree strongly with Sen. Byrd. The doctrine of preemption is flawed and very dangerous. It would be silly to argue that Saddam Hussein had no weapons, but it would be far worse, I think, to assert that he was such a grave threat to our national security that war was the only option. Surely the two months that have passed since the fall of Hussein’s regime have shown that he was not the threat Bush made him out to be.

Such weapons may eventually turn up. But my greater fear is that the belligerent stance of the United States may have convinced Saddam Hussein to sell or disperse his weapons to dark forces outside of Iraq.

If this is true, it seems that Bush’s war has achieved the very result it set out to prevent! If that is not a clear demonstration of how dangerous the Bush doctrine is, I am at a loss to make it clearer.

It is time that we had some answers. It is time that the Administration stepped up its acts to reassure the American people that the horrific weapons that they told us threatened the world’s safety have not fallen into terrorist hands.  It is time that the President leveled with the American people.  It is time that we got to the bottom of this matter.

Indeed. There should be no more of this “trust us, we’re your duly elected leaders” mentality anymore. The Bush administration has a moral obligation to level with the American public, on this and many other issues. If its track record to date is any indication of future behavior, though, I think we can expect more of the same—to the detriment of our credibility in the eyes of the entire world.

If there is one thing to be hopeful about, however, it is the fact that the right-wing attempt to impeach Bill Clinton for having an affair has significantly lowered the bar for “high crimes and misdemeanors”. If (and I realize that it’s a pretty big IF) it is determined that the Bush team did overinflate its case on Iraq, we should have little trouble getting impeachment proceedings started.

Then, perhaps, we can finally get rid of this loathsome administration and return America to the ideals that have served it so well in the years before the Bush cabal took office.