While you have a point, and it's a point that I regularly agree with (Bush is responsible for invading), the rhetoric on "lying" does get rather old.
You not only have to really stretch things on W., but ignore all of the actions of Clinton from 1996-1998, including the Clinton administrations great agitation at Russia, France and Germany in 1996, after they blocked UK and US actions in the UN Security Council in 1995 only to be proven wrong. Iraq was hiding WMDs and proven to be doing so as late as 1997, after Russia, France and Germany stated inspections had removed them all in 1995.
This is the history. People trying to demonize W., say he "lied" but they don't like to talk about the realities of Iraq from 1993-1998 under the Clinton administration when inspections were going on. Clinton also unilaterally ordered missile strikes on Iraq (all of which did not hit their targets and caused a rate of collateral damage far worse than "boots on the ground") and took many other actions without even NATO approval.
So while I utterly agree with blaming W. for many things, but the "lied" is just a little too hypocritical if you're a Democrat. That includes the Democrats -- like Hillary and Kerry -- who very much did have access to the same intelligence. There are many members of Congress that get the same intelligence reports as the W. administration, and drew the same conclusions in 2002.
That's what I really get tired of people ignoring, as much as I did not want to go into Iraq myself, and never voted for W. myself.
W. was also warned on the "reliability" of much of the intelligence too, that some of it was not verified.
Of course if you go back to 1995, there was no verified intelligence that Iraq still had WMDs either. And look what happened in 1996? We found out otherwise, and were "caught with our pants down" in 1996 as much as at the end of the 1991 war. So there was an inclination -- both in the Clinton and W. administrations -- to believe there were WMDs in the country.
In reality, there was no accounting from 1998-2003. So we'll never know what actually happened to any remaining stores that were mobile in 1998 that they had been trying to track down from 1996-1998. We only got the ones that weren't mobile in 1996-1998.
As Hans Blix repeatedly pointed out, and Libya and South Africa were regularly used as examples, inspections NEVER work unless the country FULLY DISCLOSES. Iraq never did. Of that, they were never, ever once, not once, in compliance with any resolution.
Was that justification for invading? Frankly, I could care less. I did not want to invade. But many lawyers agree that Iraq never complied with the terms of the cease fire, so it was continually void. The question was always how much did that give the US right to enforce it.
The "lying" comment is argumentative and has nothing to do with reality. Just like the argument that Iraq was a "sovereign nation." No they were not after 1991, not remotely in any legal context. But it doesn't mean the US should do something about it. Although the UN is as impotent as ... well ... you know, viagra works wonders but not everything.
