There is a pretty damning article in The Washington Post this weekend about the way President George W. Bush and his administration sold the claim that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. The article makes clear the extent to which the White House lent credence to worst case scenarios and assumptions about Saddam Hussein's intentions at the expense of plausability. The White House also misled the American public and its allies in the United Nations by selectively releasing intelligence.

After September 11, the CIA and other intelligence sources were condemned for their conservatism in analysing intelligence. Unless something was verified, they dismissed it, and thus were unable to "connect the dots" leading to Al Qaeda's terrorist attack. None voiced this critique more than the Administration Hawks such as Vice President Dick Cheney. While this criticism has merit, it has become clear that the way these Hawks interpreted intelligence in Iraq was just as flawed.

To those who didn’t know any better – that is, almost everyone except the Iraqi and U.S. intelligence agencies – the case against Iraq seemed overwhelming.

Consider this quote from Cheney, cited in The Washington Post: "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law." This sounds definitive.

Unfortunately, The Washington Post reports, the Vice President was lying:

That was a reference to Hussein Kamel, who had managed Iraq's special weapons programs before defecting in 1995 to Jordan. But Saddam Hussein lured Kamel back to Iraq, and he was killed in February 1996, so Kamel could not have sourced what U.S. officials "now know."

And Kamel's testimony, after defecting, was the reverse of Cheney's description. In one of many debriefings by U.S., Jordanian and U.N. officials, Kamel said on Aug. 22, 1995, that Iraq's uranium enrichment programs had not resumed after halting at the start of the Gulf War in 1991. According to notes typed for the record by U.N. arms inspector Nikita Smidovich, Kamel acknowledged efforts to design three different warheads, "but not now, before the Gulf War."

Using the newer aggressive mode of interpreting intelligence (and holes in intelligence, which were considered just as damning), Bush placed Saddam in a no-win situation. Based on prior experience, the Bush administration decided Saddam was an untrustworthy villain who wanted to take over the world and destroy the United States. Given this assumption, the White House further assumed Saddam was hiding weapons and commanded him to prove he did not. If you believed Saddam was hiding his weapons this made some sense. But if you allowed the remote possibility that these weapons did not exist (that the inspections and sanctions had been successful, at least, in preventing any ongoing weapons development), then a catch-22 was revealed, because Saddam could never prove the negative, that he wasn't hiding the weapons in a country the White House never failed to remind us is “the size of California.”

Although there was scant evidence for many of their allegations, the White House – and British Prime Minister Tony Blair – made specific and bold claims about Saddam's “weapons of mass destruction” programs. Bush’s claim, made in the State of the Union and other speeches, that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium sounded unequivocal. The claim was based, however, on the scantest of intelligence.

The claim that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger has now become famous as the 16 words that should not have been in the State of the Union speech. But to reduce the claim to "16 words," as Bush has sought to do, is to rewrite history. Those were not just 16 words, but a claim that stood out in the speech for its specificity and the confidence with which it was made, and part of a pattern of deception.

Citing a newly released unpublished draft white paper on Iraq, The Washington Post finds several misleading arguments the White House codified in unpublished form but repeated in speech after speech:

Much as Blair did at Camp David, the paper attributed to U.N. arms inspectors a statement that satellite photographs show "many signs of the reconstruction and acceleration of the Iraqi nuclear program." Inspectors did not say that. The paper also quoted the first half of a sentence from a Time magazine interview with U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix: "You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos." The second half of the sentence, not quoted, was: "but you don't know what's under them."

As Bush did, the white paper cited the IAEA's description of Iraq's defunct nuclear program in language that appeared to be current. The draft said, for example, that "since the beginning of the nineties, Saddam has launched a crash program to divert nuclear reactor fuel for . . . nuclear weapons." The crash program began in late 1990 and ended with the war in January 1991. The reactor fuel, save for waste products, is gone.

Given that no weapons of mass destruction or any nuclear program has been uncovered in Iraq since the United States took control, two interpretations are possible. Using the intelligence community’s previous, conservative mode of analysis, one would conclude the weapons never existed. White House has dismissed this mode of analysis, however, as insufficiently imaginative, so one must consider other possible cases. If one wishes to continue to give the President the benefit of the doubt, the most likely scenario is that Saddam’s active weapons programs and chemical and biological stockpiles are hiding in the same cave as Saddam and Osama bin Laden. And if that is the case, we are very much worse off than before the war.

If you don’t take this possibility seriously – and the White House doesn’t seem to, since they haven’t mentioned it – then you have to acknowledge a hole in the Administration’s case for war large enough to drive two mobile hydrogen-producing trailers through.