Something I’ve yet to find in the Big Media’s mentions and summaries of the Duelfer report is that President Bush never rested his case for invading Iraq on Iraq’s possession of WMDs. It was a multi-faceted case based on WMDs, violations of UN resolutions, violations of the Gulf War cease fire (which meant we were, in fact, still in a state of war with Iraq), connections with terrorists, and his pursuit of WMD capabilities.
As everyone seems to have forgotten, the Bush Doctrine was the doctrine of pre-emption, not the doctrine of unilateral action, as John Kerry spun it in the first debate. Pre-emption does not mean acting alone. Pre-emption means, as Bush stated in his 2003 State of the Union, acting BEFORE a threat is “fully” materialized or “imminent.”
In the case of Iraq, Bush clearly meant that an attack was justified whether Saddam possessed useable WMDS or not. The left’s attempt to use the Duelfer report to prove the war was unjustified because no WMDS have been found is yet another attempt at historical revisionism.
