What Did It?

by digby

Josh Marshall has asked a really fun question over at TPM cafe today: What caused the turnaround from Bush and the GOP being on top of the world and poised to rule for centuries in 2004 to where they sit today in 2006?

Most people cite Schiavo, Katrina and the attempt to gut social security, along with a bunch of other interesting moments in the decline of the house of Bush. (There are so many!)

I think all those things were huge, of course. But I actually think it was something a little more obscure. It happened just before the election in 2004 which was so personality driven (and masterfully produced by the Republicans) that people didn’t know quite what to make of it. The implications of this revelation took time for people to absorb — and when they did, they lost all faith in George W. Bush:

The 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq’s illicit weapons capability and, for the most part, Saddam Hussein did not try to rebuild it, according to an extensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that contradicts nearly every prewar assertion made by top administration officials about Iraq.

Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration chose to complete the U.S. investigation of Iraq’s weapons programs, said Hussein’s ability to produce nuclear weapons had “progressively decayed” since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no evidence of “concerted efforts to restart the program.”

The findings were similar on biological and chemical weapons. While Hussein had long dreamed of developing an arsenal of biological agents, his stockpiles had been destroyed and research stopped years before the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Duelfer said Hussein hoped someday to resume a chemical weapons effort after U.N. sanctions ended, but had no stocks and had not researched making the weapons for a dozen years.

Duelfer’s report, delivered yesterday to two congressional committees, represents the government’s most definitive accounting of Hussein’s weapons programs, the assumed strength of which the Bush administration presented as a central reason for the war. While previous reports have drawn similar conclusions, Duelfer’s assessment went beyond them in depth, detail and level of certainty.

“We were almost all wrong” on Iraq, Duelfer told a Senate panel yesterday.

That is one hell of a “mistake” and if it wasn’t a mistake it was even worse.

Those of us who followed events closely knew long before this report came out that there were no WMD. And on some level everyone else knew that something had gone wrong. I believe that when it really hit people that Bush had sold the war — repeatedly and in great detail — on something that wasn’t true, he was toast. It just took a while for it to sink in.

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