Propositions:

1. Bush lied.

2. Bush was incompetent, and drew false conclusions from the data.

Logically, these two are not, of course, mutually exclusive on a case-by-case basis.

Unfortunately, as I have documented MANY times, the Clinton administration, the United Nations, most members of Congress, and other nations (besides England) also believed before the war that it was likely Saddam had done all these things. While the U.N. and many nations were adamantly opposed to military action to disarm Saddam, not one officially stood up and stated that Saddam did not need disarming and that everyone should just forget the whole thing. Hans Blix never once stated that inspections were worthless and should be called off because obviously nothing was there.

Your standard response has been that this does not morally excuse Bush either lying or being an idiot. And as far as that goes, you are right.

Still, if Bush is either or both of these things, one then has to accept the logical premise under these circumstances that much of the rest of the world was also either lying or stupid. Is this really believable? Possible, I suppose, especially if Saddam for some psychotic reason was deliberately engineering the impression that he had weapons he never did, but how likely?

I have stated that a more likely proposition is that the weapons and links are just damn hard to find, either hidden or disassembled into benign uses. I am not postulating that everything our intelligence services said was 100 percent accurate, but your counterposition that there was never anything there to find has not been established as fact either.