Look, folks, Saddam was not one one year away from developing a bomb in 2002. That country has been searched from top to bottom, and there was no evidence of a nuclear program found. There was one after the Gulf War, just like there were active WMD programs at the time. David Kay, a guy who was a believer in Saddam’s WMD programs, had to admit in his report that there were no active programs. The infrastructure was there, and I have no doubt whatsoever that as soon as sanctions were lifted he would have started right back up again. But pointing to this one sentence in the NYT article as “proof” that Saddam was “a year away” from developing a bomb in 2002 is just absolutely flat-out wrong.
I still believe the Iraq War was, under the circumstances, fully justified. You don’t need to glom on to this one little phrase as some kind of AH HA! moment. He didn’t have active WMD, he didn’t have an active nuke program. He wanted both, he would have gotten both eventually, and as such I have no problem with Bush taking the bastard out. Focus on the reality of the situation, rather than playing semantic issues by parsing two poorly-written sentences in an article in the NYT.