weaker or stronger

Are we weaker or stronger because of the below?
Facts just now coming out:

On the day after Sept. 11, the talk of the Republicans in the White House Situation Room was of "getting Iraq," says former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke. Clarke's memoir says an insistent Bush ordered him to look for "any shred" to tie Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks — even though U.S. agencies knew al-Qaeda was responsible and Iraq wasn't linked to the terror group.

After dozens of interviews, Wilson reported back that the story appeared unfounded. The State Department's intelligence bureau also deemed it implausible. In addition, the text of the supposed Niger document, transcribed for the Americans by the Italians, contained misspellings and mistaken titles for people that should have been easily detectable.

It was a forgery. But "Niger uranium" had won a place in the case against Iraq.
Blair's Cabinet fretted. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in the secret minutes of a July 2002 meeting, observed that the case for war was "thin" but Bush had made up his mind. Intelligence chief Richard Dearlove, fresh from high-level Washington talks, also told the 10 Downing St. session that war had become inevitable, and U.S. intelligence was being "fixed" around this policy.

Blair and U.S. officials now deny war was predetermined and intelligence "fixed" to that end. From midsummer 2002 on, however, the Bush administration sharply stepped up its anti-Iraq rhetoric, along with U.S. air attacks on Iraqi defenses, done under cover of patrols over the "no-fly zones," swaths of Iraqi airspace denied to Iraqi aircraft. It also stepped up its citing of questionable intelligence.

As early as July 29, Rumsfeld spoke publicly of reports of Iraqi bioweapons labs "on wheels in a trailer" that can "make a lot of bad stuff."

As the summer wore on, Cheney struck an urgent, unequivocal tone in public.
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," the vice president told veterans assembled at an Opryland hotel in Nashville.

In an unusual move, Cheney shuttled to the CIA through mid-2002 to visit analysts 10 times, according to Patricia Wald, a member of the presidential investigative commission headed by Judge Laurence Silberman and ex-U.S. Sen. Charles Robb. The commission concluded analysts "worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."

That conventional wisdom took on more urgency on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, when the lead article in The New York Times, citing unnamed administration officials, said Iraq "has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."
The "tubes" story had been resurrected. Condoleezza Rice went on the TV talk circuit that morning saying the tubes were suited only for uranium centrifuges. Four days later in New York, President Bush was at the marble podium of the U.N. General Assembly, demanding the world body take action on Iraq or become "irrelevant." He, too, cited the aluminum tubes — proof of danger.

The Australian biologist Barton, a 1990s weapons inspector who by 2002 was a top Blix aide, was amazed at the British report's unexplained claim that Iraq could "deploy" chemical or biological weapons "within 45 minutes" — a claim picked up by Bush in a radio address.

Over an Irish-pub dinner in New York, Barton asked old friend David Kelly, a British bioweapons specialist, how he could have allowed something "so silly" in the report. "He just shook his head and said something like, 'People put in what they want to put in,'" Barton recalled.

Months later Kelly would commit suicide, caught in a political furor as a source for news reports that the WMD dossier was "sexed up."
The tubes story also had slipped deeper into murkiness. State Department intelligence was siding with Energy in viewing them as likely rocket casings. The CIA arranged for centrifuge-like testing of the tubes in January, and they seemed to fail, only to supposedly pass after a "correction" was made.

On Jan. 28, 2003, with the world listening, Bush delivered his annual address.
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," he said. "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

Washington was unmoved. Administration loyalists dismissed the "so-called inspections." In late February 2003, a Powell aide sternly told Blix nothing would suffice short of Iraq's unveiling its "secret hide sites." Most significantly, Bush ordered no reassessment of his government's collapsing claims.

Blix told the Security Council he could complete the work within months. The White House wasn't interested. "More time, more inspectors, more process, in our judgment, is not going to affect the peace of the world," Bush said on March 6, as the Pentagon counted down toward war.

Cheney at one point even told a TV audience — without challenge from the host — that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. Of ElBaradei, whose IAEA refuted the claims about uranium and tubes, Cheney said, "I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong." But the CIA had already accepted ElBaradei's judgment on the Niger uranium document.

On March 17, in New York, U.S. diplomats gave up trying to win Security Council backing for war. That evening, on television, Bush told the American people there was "no doubt" Iraq had "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
The bombing began two days later, and as U.S. troops swept up the Tigris and Euphrates plain to easy victory, they searched for WMD. "We know where they are," Rumsfeld claimed on March 30. But despite a flurry of false "finds" by eager troops, they weren't there.

Finally, on April 19, U.S. weapons hunters celebrated: An equipment-packed truck trailer had been seized in northern Iraq.
Just before the war, al-Kindi company technicians had tested the unit and it worked, its tubes spewing hydrogen for weather balloons. They could deliver on the 2001 contract. To empty-handed U.S. analysts, however, the vehicle and a second trailer looked like the artist's conception of Curveball's mobile labs, ready to concoct killer germs.

The White House embraced this illusion. "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories," President Bush assured Polish television on May 29. By then, however, experts had tested a trailer and found no trace of pathogens or toxins.

"They have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on April 10. But soon the Washington line shifted to claims Iraq had not weapons, but WMD "programs" — also untrue, inspectors later certified. Then the war was framed as one to democratize Iraq.

Month by month, David Kay and his 1,500-member Iraq Survey Group labored over documents, visited sites, interrogated detained scientists and came to recognize reality. But when he wanted to report it, Kay ran into roadblocks in Washington.
"There was an absolutely closed mind," Kay tells AP. "They would not look at alternative explanations in these cases," specifically the aluminum tubes and bioweapons trailers.

In December 2003, Kay flew back to Washington and met with Tenet and CIA deputy John McLaughlin. "I couldn't budge John, and so I couldn't budge George," he says. Kay resigned, telling the U.S. Congress there had been no WMD threat.

As late as Sept. 30 last year, in an election debate, Bush stuck to his views.
"Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming," Bush maintained.
A week before, Duelfer had conveyed his 1,000-page final report to the CIA, saying Saddam had disarmed 13 years earlier. (WEAKER OR STRONGER??)