Lol, how disingenuous of you. Nobody thought that Saddam was a swell leader. All the arguments you make above were laid out, and Americans weren't fully buying it, there was plenty of opposition, which warranted ratcheting up the hyperbole. Until we were hearing things like, "do we have to wait for the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud over a US city"? There never was such smoking gun. With any of the chemical bio or nuclear systems he ever had before or after Gulf War 1, he had nothing, nor any delivery systems that threatened us as we were to be frightened by statements like the one quoted above.
Tonight on 60 Minutes, Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe division, revealed that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.
60 Minutes: CIA Official Reveals Bush, Cheney, Rice Were Personally Told Iraq Had No WMD in Fall 2002 | ThinkProgress
