Republicans Anonymous

It is truly appalling we're not hearing more about The secret Downing Street memo describing how W and the Bush League planned in the summer of 2002 to invade Iraq using intentionally distorted intelligence:

...Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.
...
...It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran...
...Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD...If the political context were right, people would support regime change.
(Source: Timesonline [Emphasis added.])

Long story short: The entire Bush Administration knew George Bush wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein by invading Iraq. The entire Bush Administration knew Saddam Hussein's alleged WMD threat was minimal. Despite this, they cooked up an invasion scheme with the plan of justifying an otherwise illegal war of aggression by cooking up fake WMD "intelligence."

Juan Cole has an excellent post on this as well, noting:

So the "justification" would have to be provided by "fixing" the intelligence around the policy. Bush was just going to make things up, since the realities did not actually justify his planned war! The British cabinet sat around and admitted to themselves that a) there was no justification for the war into which they were allowing themselves to be dragged and b) that the war would be gotten up through Goebbels-like techniques!

It is even worse. British Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith was at the meeting. He had to think up a justification for the war in international law. Britain is in Europe, and Europe takes international law seriously. You could have war crimes trials. (Remember that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet almost got tried in Spain for killing 5000 people in the 1970s).

George W Bush has made his place in history: the first US President guilty of war crimes.

[UPDATE]
Here's a Knight-Ridder news article on the scandal: British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy