Giving it the old college try

Yesterday, Colin Powell tried gamely but lamely to defend the Bush administration and his own performance in the wake of a report issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace charging that the White House systematically misrepresented a weapons threat from Iraq.

"It is unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud missiles and facilities engaged in the ongoing production of chemical and biological weapons that officials claimed were present without the United States detecting some sign of this activity," said the report....

That from AP - and in case it didn't register, the quote is a polite way of saying the weapons simply weren't there at all. CNN adds

The report follows a nine-month search in Iraq for WMD - nuclear, biological and chemical - the key reason the administration cited in its decision to invade Iraq.

"We looked at the intelligence assessment process, and we've come to the conclusion that it is broken," author Joseph Cirincione said Thursday on CNN's "American Morning."

"It is very likely that intelligence officials were pressured by senior administration officials to conform their threat assessments to pre-existing policies." ...

More than 1,000 U.S. inspectors have worked daily since before the war began in March, searching the country and interviewing scientists and other Iraqi officials, according to Cirincione.

"We found nothing," Cirincione said. "There are no large stockpiles of weapons. There hasn't actually been a find of a single weapon, a single weapons agent, nothing like the programs that the administration believe existed."

And what was Powell's defense? As CNN has it,

Powell noted that Iraq used chemical weapons in the Iraq-Iran war and on the Kurds in the 1980s and had the chance to come clean about its programs to the international community through the '90s. ...

"In terms of intention, you always had it," he said.

This is how far they've fallen: Not only do they no longer claim Saddam had banned weapons, they've even given up on trying to imply it. Instead, it now appears that when Bush snapped "What's the difference?" when Diane Sawyer pressed him on whether Saddam had or merely wished to have such weapons, he wasn't being the idiot we all thought - he was declaring official policy.

Look! Beggars on horseback!

Addendum: Powell also defended the persistent implication of an established relationship between Baghdad and al-Qaeda.

"I have not seen smoking gun concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of some connections did exist and was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."

He "thinks" there was a "possibility" of "some" sort of "connections." Yeah, that's a standard of proof we can all get behind.

Remember when we used to think that Colin Powell, no matter his politics, was a man with some degree of honor?