THE BIG DOG SPEAKS FOR HIMSELF ABOUT WMD'S

David Corn of The Nationinterviews Bill Clinton while waiting to go on NPR:

While I was tussling with rightwing activist Grover Norquist this morning on NPR's "Diane Rehm Show," Norquist did what many conservatives do when confronted by the charge that George W. Bush dishonestly hyped the WMD threat in Iraq. He referred to Bill Clinton. The 42nd president, Norquist maintained, supported Bush's invasion of Iraq because he (Clinton, that is) also believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
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When we were just on, I said to Clinton, Norquist claimed that you supported Bush's invasion because you were concerned about Saddam Hussein's WMDs. Is that true?
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With Norquist squeezed next to him, Clinton said that had not been his position. He acknowledged that he had endorsed the congressional resolution granting Bush the authority to wage war. But, he explained, that was because he had figured Hussein would not have permitted weapons inspectors to return to Iraq without the threat of force. "Hans Blix [the chief weapons inspector] was tough," Clinton said, adding that he had wanted to see inspections continue.

Clinton, who later told Diane Rehm that he had indeed been concerned about the possibility of unaccounted-for WMDs in Iraq after inspections ended in 1998, dismissed WMDs as a reason to go to war. "Paul Wolfowitz tried to get me to invade Iraq," he recalled. In the 1990s, he said, Wolfowitz considered Iraq to be "the biggest problem"--greater than terrorism or the absence of peace in the Middle East.

Being kind to an ideological foe, Clinton noted that Wolfowitz had developed a whole theory about how a US invasion of Iraq would lead to a democratic Iraq and that the existence of this new Iraq would remake the region. Clinton indicated he never accepted this point of view, but it was, he said, a theory worth debating. Referring to the Bush administration's rationale for war, he remarked, "They should have just said that, without the pretext [of WMDs]." It was a polite way of saying the Bushies had been untruthful. After all, who is Clinton to call another president a liar?

And that, boys and girls, is the reason so many Democrats, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, voted for the Congressional resolution -- to give the pResident a tool, not a weapon. Their fault (and it IS a fault) lies in their unjustified trust in the most untrustworthy administration in our history. I guess they just couldn't believe that a son of George H.W. Bush, a man they respectfully oppose(d), could turn out to be a lying, scumbag dictator-in-the-making with a messianic complex. There were, of course, those of us who could.