You guys just don't get it. In September, 2002, Mr. Bush stated that Iraq possessed hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons and was actively developing nuclear weapons. He said then that these weapons were a threat to American citizens. He petitioned the U.N. to support military action to "disarm" Saddam. Unfortunately, for Mr. Bush, the U.N. did not find his claims credible. Mr. Bush said we'd go to war to eliminate these alleged weapons anyway. He repeated these claims in his State of the Union address.

We now know Iraq no longer possessed these large stores of chemical and biological weapons and that both British and U.S. intelligence information had been exaggerated. Some information used as "evidence" the CIA knew as early as spring 2002 was forged and not credible, yet this "evidence" was still cited by the President in his January, 2003 address to the nation. U.S. and British intelligence officers are now coming forward claiming that they had been pressured to cook the books and that the work had been exaggerated. We now have the Republicans in Congress only willing to discuss these serious problems behind closed doors out of view of the American public.

This story is no longer about Saddam Hussein - he's gone and good riddance. Instead, its about whether or not the largest democracy in the history of civilization deliberately misinformed the world inorder to manufacture a justification and motivate public support to conduct a pre-emptive war that took the lives of thousands of innocent civilians.

No matter what anyone would like to believe, you can't put your head in the sand and hope this will all go away. This more serious than the Gulf of Tonkin and certainly more important than Zippergate. The implications go well beyond election year politics and go to the heart of our American democracy and what we stand for in the eyes of the entire world. Is this a nation willing to risk its own to bring freedom to the rest of the world? Or, is this a nation that makes up stories to go to war? How we and the rest of the world answer those questions will decide the course of human history for decades to come.