Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

The campaign and the Duelfer Report

Andrew Busch walks us through the Duelfer Report and how it is to Bush’s advantage. His concluding comment: "Finally, the report opens up to public view a line of attack against Kerry that has long been available to Bush but has not been emphasized. Saddam’s WMD program did not stop in 1991 as the result of some random decision when he closed his eyes and put his finger down on a calendar. It stopped because Operation Desert Storm stopped it. If U.S. intelligence overestimated Saddam’s WMD progress in 2003, it had vastly underestimated it before 1991. After the first Gulf War, it became clear to shocked analysts that Saddam was only months away from developing nuclear weapons. In January 1991, John Kerry voted against that war, the war that kept nuclear weapons out of Saddam’s hands at nearly the last possible moment. The Bush campaign could only gain by hitting this point hard for the next three weeks. It would remind people that Saddam had a record, that Kerry has a record, and that the liberation of Iraq was less the launching of a new war than the ending of an old one, twelve years late."

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