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but the nation was eager to be deluded

I don't think that's fair. We American citizens were told directly that Iraq had WMDs and an attack on us was imminent.

If we were 'eager' for anything it was to stand together as a country. Most of us believed that the president had done due diligence (after all, he had access to intel that we didn't) and trusted him to do a competent job of analyzing the threat.

We were wrong in that trust.

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This is false. Nobody claimed or believed an attack on the US was imminent (although another attack on Israel was a concern), the idea was that taking out Saddam could help stabilize the middle east. In official Washington it was well understood that WMDs were just an excuse/legal justification/foreign policy explanation for finishing the job begun in Iraq in 1992.

Nonsense. That is exactly what the administration implied. By implying the Saddam Hussein had connections to Al Qaeda and had WMDs, he clearly implied that we had to stop Iraq or else we would be in grave danger. That constituted the bulk of his argument for the war.

Maybe "official Washington" (whatever that is) knew differently, but the Bush administration was selling the public on the vision of a mushroom cloud in front of the white house.

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