A Senate Intelligence Investigation Committee issued a bipartisan report indicating the U.N. and Europeans who opposed Bush’s invasion of Iraq based on WMD were proved right as the report states clearly and bi-partisanly, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior during the buildup of American forces to invade, and the intelligence basis for invading Iraq was false. Democrats and Republicans are split on whether the Whitehouse played a role in pressuring the intelligence agencies to produce the erroneous results they led to war.
Two facts are clear. The U.S. did not have in-country intelligence which could have confirmed whether WMD existed and to do so would have taken more time before invading. The President refused appeals to delay invasion by critics both domestic and foreign such as France, Germany, Russia, and domestic critics who warned against unilateral invasion like presidential candidates Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean. As I have written here before, Hussein was not a self-destructive leader and it would have been foolish of him to keep evidence of WMD in his country to be discovered and used as a pretext for invasion and deposing him as leader of Iraq. That contention has now been vindicated by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
