Revelations of no WMDs in Iraq show deception, incompetence at work | ajc.com

Read the lead editorial in today's Atlanta Journal-COnstitution: "...Questions about the honesty, wisdom, judgment and competence of our current leadership are far from meaningless. We are not debating the relative merits of Thomas Jefferson vs. John Adams; we are attempting to decide whether our current leaders can be trusted to handle the challenges we face.

It matters, for instance, that Vice President Dick Cheney now says that the Bush administration would have invaded Iraq even if it had known that Saddam had no WMD and no ties to al-Qaida. Intrigued by the admission on 'Meet the Press' Sunday, host Tim Russert pressed the point with Cheney:

'So if the CIA said to you [in 2003] 'Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction, his chemical and biological have been degraded, he has no nuclear program under way,' you'd still have invaded Iraq?'

Yes, Cheney said.

In other words, Iraqi WMD weren't the reason we went to war, they were merely the excuse that Cheney and his colleagues needed to scare up public support. That's a relevant piece of information as Americans try to decide how much faith they can put in this administration."