"The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists," the president of the United States warned. "If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow."

The secretary of state loyally followed this hard line, defending the U.N. sanctions on Saddam Hussein: "There has never been an embargo against food and medicine. It's just that Hussein has just not chosen to spend his money on that. Instead, he has chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."

Leveraging U.N. resolutions to support military action, the secretary of defense said: "The United Nations has determined that Saddam should not possess chemical or biological or nuclear weapons, and what we have is the obligation to carry out the U.N. declaration."

The officials argued that U.N. inspections weren't enough. "It is ineffectual; it is not able to do its job by its own judgment," the president's national security adviser said of the U.N. inspections regime. "It doesn't provide much deterrence against WMD activity."

The president's congressional loyalists stood behind him. "Iraq is not the only nation in the world to possess weapons of mass destruction," said a prominent senator, sounding a familiar theme, "but it is the only nation with a leader who has used them against his own people."

"For the United States and Britain, an Iraq equipped with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons under the leadership of Saddam Hussein is a threat that almost goes without description," said another hawk, taking aim at the split in the international community. "France, on the other hand, has long established economic and political relationships within the Arab world, and has had a different approach."

Who were the political leaders who, according to critics of the Iraq war, perpetrated this fraud on the American people by making overblown warnings about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction? Respectively, President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Sen. Tom Daschle and Sen. John Kerry. Continued...