Maybe Clinton felt that he couldn't rightly condemn Bush for lying when he was guilty of it himself. If so, that's weak. Why? Because when he lied, no one died.
On another note, this Niger uraniam claim must go all the way up into the upper echelons of the White House. There is evidence that Cheney was the one that requested that an operative go down to Niger to ascertain if the intelligence was foolproof. An operative by the name of Joe Wilson was sent. The results? No evidence to support the claim that Iraq bought or sought uranium (yellowcake) from Niger. Don't you think that Cheney would have been biting at the bit to find out if there was even an ounce of accuracy to the claim? I do too.
Bush, on the other hand, might not have been in the know as much as Cheney; but I have a hard time believing that. He has seemed as gung-ho for this war as any of the other neo-cons, all of them throwing tantrums like toddlers when the UN wouldn't give them the support they wanted.
Yes, this investigation needs to go deeper and higher up that chain. We were frightened into this war because they escalated fears that Saddam had massive amounts of biological and chemical weapons and posed an immenent threat because he was on the verge of proliferating nuclear weapons.
CNN reported that presidential hopeful Gephardt, in his speech yesterday to the San Francisco Bar Association, attacked Bush for his "Iraq policy, accusing him of disregarding diplomacy, antagonizing allies, cozying up to Saudi Arabia and undermining U.S. credibility with ‘chest-beating unilaterism.’"
In regards to diplomacy, Gephardt condemned Bush for burning bridges:
"Diplomacy matters. Burden-sharing matters. Follow-through matters. And yes, sustaining the peace is harder, more complex and often costlier than winning the war itself. No matter the surge of momentary machismo -- as gratifying as it may be for some -- it's short-sighted and wrong to simply go it alone."
In regards to Iraq, Gephardt condemned Bush for wrongly building up weak intelligence to go to war. CNN summarized his speech--
...Gephardt reiterated his support for the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, saying he believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or components for such weapons. But, he said, that didn't give the administration license to issue what he called "carefully parsed and cleverly tailored claims" to make the case for war.
"In an era when our gravest security threats are covert, when troops must be committed on the basis of scraps of intelligence, not flag-waving invasions from overseas, how can we compromise the integrity of our word?" Gephardt said.
And just in time for the release of the 9/11 documents, Gephardt criticized the Bush for being soft on Saudi Arabia, the country where the majority of the hijackers originated:
Some of his harshest comments were reserved for the administration's policy toward oil-rich Saudi Arabia. Gephardt said the administration had taken a soft approach to Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that most of the September 11, 2001 hijackers were Saudi nationals and despite what he described as evidence of Saudi citizens supporting terrorism.
"This administration needs to stop behaving like the United States of Saudi Arabia and it needs to start mobilizing international pressure to get Saudi Arabia to stop funding, training and breeding global terror in the first place," Gephardt said.
Kudos to Gephardt for keeping these topics out in the public eye. Though the GOP are on the offensive, trying to quail the surging tide, the maelstrom of scandal is not going away.
(Quotes taken from CNN's article "Gephardt rips Bush 'machismo' on Iraq," published online on July 23, 2003.)
