PLAYING POLITICS WITH THE WAR.

It is not that these critics are wrong, which they are. It is that they know they are wrong. The former State Department official — Greg Thielmann — and I spoke about his charges that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld committed fraud both in his 1998 commission report on ballistic missile threats to the United States and more recently about the nature of the threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

I noted to him that not once did the administration say the Iraqi threat was imminent. The president said repeatedly that if the threat became imminent, it would essentially be too late — National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the "smoking gun" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon might well be a mushroom cloud over New York. Mr. Thielmann told me that Miss Rice’s comments "were the worst kind of warmongering" but admitted that the administration had never claimed an attack was imminent. At his press conference, he repeated the charge anyway.

He also admitted the United Nations prior to 1998 had indeed found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were not now accounted for — proving that it is the critics of the administration who are guilty of a "faith-based" assumption that Saddam would not use such weapons during whatever period inspections might have continued, or once inspections were ended.

He also repeatedly claimed that the 1998 Rumsfeld report made irresponsible predictions that rogue states would develop long-range missiles in five years from the date of the report. When I read him a quote from one of the Democratic members of the commission, Dr. Richard Garwin, that the commission report made no such predictions about the future deployment dates of long-range missiles, Mr. Thielmann again conceded the point, only to again argue in public the exact opposite...

In the one area where the administration relied on British intelligence that was not backed up by separate U.S. intelligence sources — the belief that Niger was approached in an Iraqi attempt to purchase uranium — I asked Mr. Thielmann what members of Congress were persuaded by that piece of information, whose support for the Iraqi war resolulion would have been reversed should the administration never have made such a claim.

Of course, Mr. Thielmann could not name a single member of Congress whose support was based on the uranium claim.

Indeed - for the Congress had voted and given the President the authorization to deal with Iraq in September of 02, four months before the State of the Union Speech.

So their complaints of the "16 words" seems a bit specious in that light, do they not?Article by Peter Huessy, Washington Times, 22 July, "Faith-based Arms Control", but for some reason I can't link to it.