Rice Spin

"I am not going to comment on a book that I haven't read," she said, referring to McClellan's scathing memoir, "but what I will say is that the concern about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the fundamental reason."

"It was not the United States of America alone that believed that he had weapons of mass destruction that he was hiding," Rice said, dismissing suggestions that the administration knew the intelligence was incorrect.

"The story is there for everyone to see, you can't now transplant yourself into the present and say we should have know what we in fact did not know in 2001 and 2002," she said. "The record on weapons of mass destruction was one that appeared to be very clear."

Those who were skeptical should have spoken up at the time and argued against U.N. sanctions such as the oil-for-food program, she said.

"The threat from Saddam Hussein was well understood," Rice said. "You can agree or disagree about the decision to liberate Iraq in 2003, but I would really ask that if you ... believe he was not a threat to the international community, then why in the world were you allowing the Iraqi people to suffer under the terms of oil-for-food."

The heart of the McClellan book concerns Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, a determination McClellan says the president had made by early 2002 — at least a full year before the invasion — if not even earlier.

"He signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest," McClellan writes in "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

During the "political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people," Bush and his team tried to make the "WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were." Something else was downplayed as well, McClellan says: any discussion of "the possible unpleasant consequences of war — casualties, economic effects, geopolitical risks, diplomatic repercussions."

NVDL: Nothing new there, except that Rice and her cohorts are still doing that. She uses the words 'weapons of mass destruction' wherever she can. Anyway, at least we don't have to worry about the USA spinning their way into another war, with, say Iran. I mean, there are no weapons of mass destruction there, in Iran, are there? I'm just concerned when Ms. Rice wakes up and realises a country that hates the USA and has proved they have nukes - North Korea - already exists. When she does I think we might well hear a speech like this from her:
I think because of the weapons of mass destruction there we need to use our very underutilised weapons of mass destruction because if we don't use our weapons of mass destruction first someone else will use their weapons of mass destruction first, and we can't have anyone usinbg weapons of mass destruction against us. Did I mention that we are very concerned that some nations might have weapons of mass destruction and we reserve to make sure that they don't have weapons of mass destruction, even if it means using our weapons of mass destruction...