Who Is Lying About Iraq?

As this piece by Norman Podhoretz points out, the answer is crystal clear: The Democrats are.

Here's a brief excerpt:

[T]he consensus on which Bush relied [in stating that Iraq had WMD] was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained “absolutely convinced” of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

That's the tip of the iceberg. In the piece there are also plenty of quotes to the same effect from Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence the Administration had.

But the main point is this: The quotes above make it absolutely laughable -- a lie, in fact -- for Democrats to assert that President Bush led us into war by using or manipulating evidence that he knew to be false. Of course that won't stop the Democrats from making the charge. But it does make it absolutely apparent that they're doing it for only the basest political reasons.