corrente

Excellent analysis from George A. Lopez and David Cortright in the Boston Glob.

The senators should stop asking why Washington saw weapons where there weren't any. Rather, they must ask -- and have answered -- why a plethora of publicly available information on the destruction and deterioration of Iraq's weapons capability was not processed into the equation about the scope of Iraqi firepower.

Without question, verifiable "on the plus side" data about the success of economic sanctions and the destruction of WMD materiel supervised by UN inspectors from 1991 to 1998 was consistently neglected by war planners, the press, and politicians. And classified intelligence should have augmented this data. But the inability or unwillingness to properly debit the 1990 estimates of Iraqi weapons with the discount factor of their degradation due to our own successful policies constitutes an intelligence debacle.

No more glaring example of this exists than the failure of analysts to properly prepare Secretary of State Colin Powell for his Feb. 5, 2003, presentation before the Security Council. A number of prohibited materials mentioned by Powell were, in fact, known to have been intercepted before entering Iraq. These materials included specialized aluminum tubes, vacuum tubes, a magnet production line, a large filament winding machine, fluorine gas, and other goods that could have nuclear weapons-related applications. Senators need to examine how and why such flawed testimony was permitted to move forward.
(via Here)

Well, should we make something that's simple seem complicated?

No (by Occam's razor).

Bush wanted to have his war, and was willing to say or do anything to have it. So he lied. Powell was expendable, and so he was lied to. See how simple it can be?