WERE WE ALMOST ALL WRONG?

If you haven't heard by now, Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat when Bush led the US to war, according to David Kay, formerly President Bush's chief weapons inspector in Iraq.

Oops.

That can't be good, and now the Bush administration (including Kay) is circling the wagons:

Kay defended President Bush and laid blame on the intelligence community.

Let's call this the memory hole strategy: hope that no one remembers exactly what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and others told us about the status of Iraq and their use of intelligence in justifying the rush for war. After all, that debate happened over a year ago, and g-d knows there's been an abundance of Survivor and American Idol viewing with which to displace America's collective memory in the meantime.

Fortunately, the good people at the Center for American Progress have compiled this handy little timeline, complete with links to original White House press releases and transcripts and other primary sources.

It's not so clear cut that American (and foreign) intelligence agencies handed Bush faulty information which prompted him to war and the ensuing fiasco in Iraq. After all, Colin Powell paraded scores of photographs of purported WMDs before the UN Security Council.

Rather, intelligence was an ex post facto justification for a forgone policy decision to attack Iraq made on September 12, 2001 (see Bob Woodward's shameless told-directly-from-the-mouth-of-the-administration Bush at War for evidence of this--though I implore you to read it at the book store, borrow it from the library, or steal it--don't waste your hard earned money on this tripe).