"Who is lying about Iraq"

One of the things that has been frustrating about the media coverage of the Bush administration is the way that the storyline has been set on Iraq. Somehow, the perception has taken place that the Bush administration lied about intelligence, mis-used intelligence, pressured the intelligence services, and created an impression of danger in Iraq when that danger didn't actually exist. The perception is, of course, complete and total hogwash. Whether we found the stockpiles we expected or not, no one, in the run-up to the war, disputed that Iraq had weapons, had weapons programs and was a threat.

And a lot of the evidence has been gathered in one place in a must-read from Norman Podhoretz. Check it out.

All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam’s stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the sixteen resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

It's long, and well documented, peppered with quotes, and compelling.