It seems that President Bush cannot deliver a State of the Union address without deceiving the American people. Or, at the least, trying to deceive them.

A year ago, on the eve of the president's pre-emptive war against Iraq, Bush told the American people and their Congress that Iraq was busy trying to acquire materials from Africa to develop nuclear weapons. The suggestion was that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein either had or was close to obtaining the most threatening of all weapons of mass destruction.

By summer, it was clear that Bush had been wrong. And there was a good deal of evidence to suggest that the president, or at least his top aides, knew that his claims about weapons of mass destruction were inaccurate before they were inserted in his most high-profile address prior to the beginning of the war.

No one expected Bush to apologize for being wrong, let alone for lying, when he delivered this year's State of the Union speech. For Bush, being president means never having to say you're sorry. But there was a general assumption that he would try to address the embarrassing discrepancy between his statement of the previous year and reality.

And so he did.

In an elaborate twist of rhetoric, Bush declared, "Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." That was a reference to an interim report by David Kay, the chief U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq.

Unfortunately for Bush, Kay stepped down three days later and admitted that he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. Kay told the Reuters news service that he had concluded there were no stockpiles of WMDs to be found in Iraq and, more importantly, that he does not now believe they were produced in the first place. "I don't think they existed," Kay told Reuters. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s."

On Sunday, Kay told National Public Radio that he had concluded that U.N. inspections "got rid of" weapons of mass destruction in Iraq long before the Bush administration began claiming that an invasion was necessary to eliminate the WMD threat.

Kay still cuts Bush some slack, suggesting that there was an intelligence breakdown. But it is notable that U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who was the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, opposed the fall 2002 congressional vote authorizing Bush to use force against Iraq. Graham said at the time that the intelligence data he had seen did not suggest that Iraqi WMDs posed a significant enough threat to justify a pre-emptive war. So it appears that the breakdown may have come when the White House decided to manipulate data to justify the war.

Several members of Congress, including U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, have called for an investigation of how intelligence was used - and misused - prior to the launch of the war.

That investigation should, of course, examine the dubious claims that George W. Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address. In light of Kay's statements of the past few days, investigators will also have to examine the dubious claims that Bush made in his 2004 State of the Union address.

Copyright 2003 The Capital Times

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