THIS ARTICLE BY GLENN KESSLER IN THE WASHINGTON POST contains an amazing howler in the very first sentence:

The Bush administration’s inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq –after public statements declaring an imminent threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — has begun to harm the credibility abroad of the United States and of American intelligence, according to foreign policy experts in both parties.

Kessler has apparently been reading too many Howard Dean press releases. Otherwise he’d know that Bush said we should strike before the threat became imminent. Perhaps he should try reading USA Today instead, which gets it right:

The word “imminent” is key to differentiating Dean’s policy from the president’s decision to invade Iraq, said Jeremy Ben-Ami, policy director for Dean’s campaign.

Bush “sold the war on the basis of an imminent threat to U.S. security, and that has now been shown to be false,” Ben-Ami said. Since the threat from Iraq was not imminent, the administration could not properly justify the war, he said.

However, when Bush laid out the case for the war in his 2003 State of the Union address, he said the United States should not wait for an imminent threat.

“Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent,” Bush said. “Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein … is not an option.”

(Emphasis added). Really — how hard is this to understand? Too hard, apparently, for a bigshot reporter at the Post. I think that this error is big enough that the Post needs to run a correction — and on the front page where this embarrassing mistake occurred.

UPDATE: Powerline says that Kessler is misquoting Bush to support his storyline. Follow this link and see what you think — it looks pretty damning to me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Don Williams sends this link to a White House transcript where spokesman Scott McClellan uses the term imminent threat. But Kessler’s story specifically invokes Bush’s State of the Union address from last year, which he then, according to the Powerline post linked above, proceeds to misquote.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jim Brenneke emails: “As I read the transcript of McClellan, I believe the “Imminent Threat” referred to is a threat to Turkey, not to the U.S. Have I misinterpreted something?” I don’t think so. And reader Todd Burri sends this:

Your reference to the WaPo Glenn Kessler story reminded me of a piece by Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson, which ran in the Milwaukee paper a couple days ago. He makes basically the same “Bush Lied” argument about WMDs and imminent threats.

I think the administration could have been more forthright making its case for war, but still… Once More With Feeling: the 1991 armistice agreement made it Hussein’s responsibility to verifiably disarm. A string of Security Council resolutions reiterated it was up to Hussein to verifiably disarm. It was not our task to prove he had these weapons; it was his task to prove he didn’t.

Phrases like ‘no solid/concrete/irrefutable evidence,’ when used by the ‘Bush lied’ crowd, are an attempt to return to Hussein the benefit of the doubt. He forfeited the benefit of the doubt a long time ago He may have disarmed, but he didn’t prove it. I am surprised that no WMDs have been found, but I am not terribly dismayed. That failure means one of two things: either Hussein hid them prior to the war, or he had in fact disposed of them. If the former, they’ll turn up. There’s a lot of searching to do yet. If the latter, then we’re stuck with the strangest possible scenario: Hussein rid himself of WMD but declined to convince the UN that he had done so, thus permitting sanctions to stay in place when he could have had them lifted. Why do you suppose he’d do that? To get rich on illegal oil sales and skimmed humanitarian aid? To continue keeping his people down by funneling resources to his most favored (a la Kim Jong-il)? To keep other Muslims inflamed by making the West out to be the bad guy?

It seems like the “Bush Lied” story is a sort of hot potato that gets passed around a group of like-minded writers, and everybody gets a turn at doing it.

Yes. And everybody gets a turn refuting it, apparently!