It never fails. What goes around ... Just a few years ago, Republicans were outraged because president Bill Clinton did not tell the truth about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. It was hard to tell what upset them more: the president's acts or the American public's seeming indifference to them.
Now, Democrats are equally upset because of the White House's belated admission that President George W. Bush told untruths in this year's State of the Union speech, and their outrage is amplified by the fact that most people do not seem to care.
This time, the Democrats have a case: The credibility of the Bush administration, especially the quality of its intelligence, has never been more important. The charges first uttered against Iraq are being echoed in claims that Iran and North Korea are building nuclear weapons. This time, there is growing agreement that the danger is real, but the controversy swirling around the Iraqi allegations has cast a shadow over all US claims, and complicated efforts to cobble together the international coalition needed to stop those countries from proliferating.
The administration claimed that Iraq's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat to the United States and the world. That was the official rationale for brushing aside containment and the UN monitoring programme - Remember them? The guys who couldn't find weapons of mass destruction? - and proceeding with a 'pre-emptive war'.
It turns out that not only was the evidence less than compelling, but some of it was outright fake. And US intelligence agencies knew that. The question that remains unanswered is how Mr Bush could declare in his State of the Union speech that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Africa when a former US ambassador had already travelled to the country in question - on the instructions of the CIA - and determined that the evidence was forged. CIA head George Tenet has taken the blame, but his 'confession' raises as many questions as it answers. Why did he approve a statement that the CIA had removed from another speech delivered in October, when he knew the evidence was false?
Equally troubling is the transformation of 'concerns' into certainties. For example, Iraq purchased aluminium tubes that had several uses, only one of which was nuclear weapons development. The US government's most expert analysts thought they were not suited for building nukes, but their views were ignored and the possibility that they might have been used for nuclear weapons became 'proof' of Iraq's intentions.
