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Bush's Case for War Crumbles
Is there anything at all left of the Bush administration's case for going to war in Iraq or, for that matter, the way it has been fought?

The answer seems increasingly doubtful given what appears to be an accelerating cascade of news, leaks and admissions by senior administration officials over the past several weeks.

Consider what has been disclosed in just the last few days.

On Monday, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that he had never seen any "strong, hard evidence that links" ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with the al-Qaeda terrorist network, which was one of the administration's two major justifications for the war.

One day later, the New York Times confirmed reports by Knight Ridder newspapers about the existence of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) study on the Iraq-based Jordanian "arch-jihadi," Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which had found no concrete evidence to support the administration's pre-war insistence that Hussein's government had given him safe haven or that he coordinates his actions in any way with al-Qaeda.

On Wednesday, Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, pounded the final nail in the coffin of the second most commonly cited justification for the March 2003 invasion.

His final report concluded not only that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at the time of the invasion, but that he made no effort to reconstitute them after United Nations weapons inspectors left the country in 1998. ...