If i may quote Tony Blankley - its a really interesting column
<a target=new href="http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030603-084017-7635r.htm"><b>George 'Machiavelli' Bush? Nah</b></a>
We are now to believe that the president is the devious mastermind of a mind-bogglingly complex plot to deceive the world into thinking Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. Not only did he have to deceive the credulous and naive French Intelligence Service, but also Russian and German intelligence, the U.N. Security Council and their inspectors, the State Department bureaucracy, including Colin Powell personally, and Tony Blair and the vaunted British Intelligence establishment. Because before the war, all those entities honestly believed — and consistently reported to the world press — that they believed Saddam had such weapons.
Let's be clear what the news media and political charge is against President Bush: He "hyped" the facts; he politicized classified intelligence; he misled the world, he stated facts he had reason to know weren't true. To have accomplished such a thing, he didn't have to merely fool a gullible public, he also had to fool his own government bureaucracy, because in Washington a classified government secret is the common knowledge of every 27-year-old cable news producer by about 11 a.m. Remember, last August field-grade officers were leaking Pentagon war plans to the New York Times and The Washington Post on a regular basis? If these same war-averse men had possessed information to contradict President Bush over the last six months, when he was talking about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, does any one doubt they would have leaked such information before their morning coffee breaks? To have accomplished both such manipulation of his government and of world opinion would seem inconsistent with the media's portrayal of him as a Forrest Gump type. Now, they would have us see George Bush as possessing all the skills and instincts of Nicoli Machiavelli and Joseph Goebbels.
In 1998, President Clinton called for, and Congress passed into law, the official U.S. government policy on Iraq: Regime change due to their possession of weapons of mass destruction...
The real question the world should be asking is not why Mr. Bush went to war, but why Saddam did. For what was Saddam willing to risk his regime and life? Consider, up to the moment of the war, if he had agreed to cooperate with the U.N. weapons inspectors, war could have been avoided. .That Saddam chose to fight, answers all rational questions. But even now, a deranged world and a Bush-hating Democratic Party (and their media auxiliary) insist on putting our good president in the dock, rather than the evil Saddam — the greatest killer of Muslims in history."
<a target=new href="http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9802/17/iraq.clinton/">(CNN: Clinton demands total access for U.N. arms inspectors -02.17.98)</a>
<a target=new href="http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/">(CNN: Clinton Speech - Iraq has Abused its Last Chance -12.16.98)</a>
<a target=new href="http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/#2">(CNN: Clinton - Strikes Necessary to Stunt Weapons Programs -12.16.98)</a>