The release of the 9-11 commission report had to please the Bush administration somewhat because it blamed faulty intelligence gathering, rather than outright lying by the President and his minions, for the lack of weapons of mass destruction, which would have justified the administration’s actions. Yet, I am not inclined to let Bush off the hook because I knew all along no WMDs existed. Anyone who saw Scott Ritter on television before he was smeared and banned knew there were none. Despite the fact that he was a decorated marine with seven plus years of intimate experience with Iraqi weapons programs, he was called a liar, a coward, a traitor, and a stooge for Hussein. Low and behold it turns out that everything he said back then was correct, the weapons had already been destroyed, no real need for a war.

My questions for those who want to exonerate George Bush are these. How many times did the President have Scott Ritter into the Oval Office to brief him on Iraqi WMDs? Who could Bush have had in there that knew as much about subject as Ritter did? Did not many of the people attacking Scott Ritter with such vitriol have ties to the administration? If the White House had a television set, then Bush had access to the correct intelligence, he just chose to ignore it.

It now appears that if John Kerry is elected in November he will make the same mistake of not listening to Scott Ritter that George Bush did before the war. As Justin Raimondo so eloquently reminded us on July 26th Kerry has no intention of ending the war if elected. He writes, “Their (the Democrats) candidate is for the war: he voted for it (but not to fund it), he wants to expand it (by sending in at least 40,000 more American troops), and his only argument with the Bush administration is over which direction to escalate.” Kerry is about to pursue the same course of action that he spent so much time and energy criticizing in the 1970s, continuing to fight a war that cannot be won. Once again it is Scott Ritter who is pointing out the folly of our political leadership. Ritter writes in the International Herald Tribune that, The Iraqi resistance is no emerging"marriage of convenience," but rather a product of years of planning. Rather than being absorbed by a larger Islamist movement, Saddam's former lieutenants are calling the shots in Iraq, having co-opted the Islamic fundamentalists years ago, with or without their knowledge. He also points out that, Regardless of the number of troops the United States puts on the ground or how long they stay there, Allawi's government is doomed to fail. The more it fails, the more it will have to rely on the United States to prop it up. The more the United States props up Allawi, the more discredited he will become in the eyes of the Iraqi people - all of which creates yet more opportunities for the Iraqi resistance to exploit.

Without us Allawi has no more chance than Thieu did. When Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 he could of got the same deal that he got in 1973, a united Vietnam with a communist government, without all the intervening bloodshed. Let us hope that Kerry can somehow puzzle out the fact that he was on the right side of the argument back then but is on the wrong side of the argument now.