Before the Invasion, Pt. I

First of three articles examining the case for war...

The first- James Fallows looks at the President's recent speeches defending the war. He focuses not on the President said, but rather what issues he ommits from speeches. This is key:

What Bush Isn't Addressing on Iraq

So when the President decided on Friday to "respond to the critics" of his Iraq policy, naturally he did nothing of the kind. For the record, here are the three biggest, most obvious points not even addressed in his speech:

1) Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong, and everybody came to the same conclusion we did. The foreigners came to that conclusion through their intelligence services, and the Democrats (especially that weaselly Kerry and ambitious Hillary) did it when they voted for the war resolution.

....

2) To say that Saddam Hussein might have been a threat is not to say that we had to invade when we did.

...

3) As for managing Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, there is no shared blame at all. The Bush Administration owns every aspect of this disastrously bungled situation.