Bush knew that Saddam didn't have WMD

[minionofmidas]

Not exactly surprising. The headline's wrong, though: Bush knew that all the saner members of his own administration and secret services felt that they knew that Saddam had no WMDs. And he actively covered that up, with massive connivance from the so-called media. But that's not the same as "he knew Saddam didn't have WMDs" (although I would consider this quite possible, I'm more inclined to believe he convinced himself that what he wanted to believe was true. Same goes for his innermost circle, of course. Call it mass self-hypnosis.)

[minionofmidas]

According to this article, Tenet told the President that the Iraqi Foreign Minister said they didn't have WMD. He didn't believe the Foreign Minister. I wouldn't have believed the Foreign Minister.

Not a smoking gun.

This is yet another piece of evidence, added to numerous other pieces, that show that the existance of WMD's in meaningful quantities was very much a topic of debate.

It was not. The case was settled, closed and shut to all but the wilfully blind.

[minionofmidas]

This is the problem when you depend solely on intelligence provided by dissidents, since we did not have anyone in the country at the time providing intelligence directly to us. 

There were weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq which Bush pulled out prior to launching the invasion. The whole idea that "we didn't have the intelligence because we didn't have anybody in the country" is such BS.

I'm talking about imbedded intelligence, such as CIA, not weapons inspectors.  Remember, our inspectors were being shuffled around and denied access to many areas prior to the second phase of the war, so that alone provided belief behind the "he must be hiding them" claim which most of the Western nations governments believed.

Uh, no. The matter for Western governments was merely whether the hide of Saddam Hussein and the pursuit of truth and common decency were worth risking the alliance with America about. (And of course, the hides of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis - but that niggling doubt, of course, could be explained away by pointing out that their lives were hardly wonderful under the status quo and that the neocons' rosy scenarios about Iraq's future under the Americans, while highly dubious, could not be dismissed quite out of hand.) And then the issue got even more complex as eastern Europeans (and also a fewmiddling-sized western European governments. *cough* Spain *cough* Netherlands) felt they had a choice between Western European hegemony or American one... and they chose the further-away and thence less potentially dangerous side, especially since its rhetoric was also much more agressive. By that point, whether or no a country joined the "coalition of the willing" had nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq anymore.
One of world diplomacy's ugliest messes ever, the whole affair. Of course, it was recklessly engendered by a certain White House administration, which doesn't really clear everybody else. Much as WWI is more the fault of the Germans and the Austrians than anybody else, but still is sort of everybody's fault.

[minionofmidas]

This is somewhat disturbing, but one must also realize that Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction and had to be removed from power and diplomacy just was not going to do the trick.

Saddam Hussein was a WMD? What does that mean? That's got to be the lamest excuse for no weapons I've ever heard.

Yes, he killed hundreds if not thousands of his own citizens just for not agreeing with him.

Pretty standard authoritarian conditions. I certainly don't condone such actions, but it's hardly US policy to start wars over such things. Look at Darfur, for instance. Countless dead and we haven't done anything. Further, nearly all these atrocities took place in the Reagan years when Saddam Hussein was a US ally. It just doesn't make sense as a reason for war.

"US ally" is a somewhat overblown statement, actually. To be quite fair here.

[minionofmidas]

This is somewhat disturbing, but one must also realize that Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction and had to be removed from power and diplomacy just was not going to do the trick.

Saddam Hussein was a WMD? What does that mean? That's got to be the lamest excuse for no weapons I've ever heard.

Yes, he killed hundreds if not thousands of his own citizens just for not agreeing with him.

Then explain western, or rather UK- and US support for Karimov's regime in Uzbekistan.

The fact that the invasion of Iraq had anything remotely to do with altruism is one of the bigger myths connected to this war.

The fact that the opposition against it was not as united as it needed to be does have a lot to do with Saddam's track record, though.