There is something the phrases "flawed intelligence" and "the Bush administration" have in common.
The answer is redundancy.
Lately, anytime you hear "flawed intelligence," the politically correct way to say a governmental mess, President Bush's name isn't too far from it.
Bush on Wednesday accepted responsibility for claiming Saddam Hussein was trying to buy nuclear material from an African nation. The claim was made in Bush's State of the Union address, and is said to be based on forged papers.
If the president lied to the American people about this issue, there's really no reason to trust him at all about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. After all, no discovery of any such weapons has been made.
That being said, the war with Iraq might have been a mistake. Bush rallied troops and the American people to support the war and led them all to believe that the United States had been threatened and was in need of protection.
The United States waged a war against a country who was supposedly posing a threat to our national security. It was a simple pre-emptive strike: You might get me, so I'm going to get you first.
Americans were told we were in danger and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. citizens feeling that they, their family or their country was going to be harmed would obviously want and demand action.
If you thought Saddam was gaining nuclear material from Africa to create weapons, of course you would want Bush to go in there and eliminate the threat.
But if Saddam didn't have any weapons, the legitimacy of the war evaporates.
It's true Saddam was a ruthless dictator who murdered his own people. Removing a man such as him from power is a legitimate cause. But the reason our nation rallied around Operation Iraqi Freedom was taking away chemical, biological and nuclear weapons from said ruthless dictator.
The bottom line is Americans were lied to because weapons have still not been found. Bush needs to do more than accept responsibility for his allegations.
He needs to accept the responsibility that he destroyed a country over flawed intelligence.
