Excellent Jay Bookman column

From the AJC:

Did the Bush administration mislead the American people in order to draw us into war?

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is a little more complicated, but it leads to the same place: Yes.

Defenders of the administration point out that before the war, most of Washington --- and most foreign intelligence agencies --- believed that Saddam Hussein retained at least some biological and chemical weapons.

That much is true. Even the Clinton administration believed that Saddam still possessed at least some weapons of mass destruction.

Unfortunately, to hype its case for war, the Bush administration pushed beyond those widely accepted facts to make three other assertions that were outright deceptive.

First, it argued that Saddam's WMD caches posed a direct danger to our safety and could perhaps be delivered to U.S. shores by "unmanned aerial devices" that later proved as real as a Martian death ray.

Read the rest of Bush and Co. pulled wool over own eyes