The President's speech of March 17, 2003, is well worth revisiting:

Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again -- because we are not dealing with peaceful men.

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

The revisionist history we are being repeatedly subjected to by this administration regarding the war in Iraq cannot be permitted to dominate our discourse. The President made it very clear on the eve of war that we were going for one overarching purpose: to disarm Iraq. If peaceful efforts to do this had failed, then where are the WMD's? The contention that there was "no doubt" that Iraq possessed such WMD's is pure deceit. To assert that everyone (including Clinton) believed that Saddam possessed WMD's is likewise deceitful.

Beginning in mid-2002...the official statements of the threat shifted dramatically toward greater alarm regarding certainty of the threat and greater certainty as to the evidence. This shift does not appear to have been supported by new, concrete evidence from intelligence community reports – at least those now publicly available. These statements were picked up and amplified by congressional leaders, major media, and some experts.

Most of the official statements on Iraq's weapon programs were supported by a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq that was produced, partially in response to congressional requests, over a three-week period in September 2002. It was delivered to Congress ten days before the vote authorizing the use of force to compel Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions. The Director of Central Intelligence released an unclassified version of the estimate, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs", in October 2002.

Three aspects of this NIE merit particular attention: It was produced far more quickly than is normal for such documents; it went far beyond the consensus intelligence assessments of the preceding five years; and, it had more serious dissents to its key findings than any other declassified NIE.

In a statement clearly intended to both revise history and to throw a blanket of political immunity over a series of politicized manipulations of pre-war intelligence, Donald Rumsfeld asserted the following:

The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder. We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on September 11th.

From "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications" (ibid above), comes the rebuttal:

The Bush National Security Strategy reflected this transformed world view in a posture toward deterrence poles apart from [Condoleezza] Rice's earlier treatment: "Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past." This is a profoundly incorrect portrayal of the Cold War strategies of deterrence and containment. They were anything but "reactive" policies, because there could have been no acceptable reaction to a Soviet first strike. Deterrence and containment were active strategies to prevent an attack, not respond to it...

…the assertion that the threat that became visible on 9/11 erased deterrence against states can rest only on the belief that rogue states will give WMD to terrorists…and/or that they are led by madmen. Neither can be considered to be automatically true or very likely. Fore example, Saddam Hussein had shown beginning with the 1991 war that he did not use his chemical weapons against the United States and for years afterward in his modulated responses to international pressure and international weakness that while unpredictable and sometimes hard to understand even in retrospect, he was not undeterrable. The assertion may, instead, reflect excessive fear due to the shock of an unprecedented attack on the U.S. homeland.

Perhaps I'm just unpatriotic (and a little manic), but I just can't seem to let this WMD thing go.

In the spirit of pointing out the obvious in a world wherein facts no longer seem to matter, check out The Buying of the President 2004. Here's a taste of the fun therein!