No...YOU THINK that you have established that Bush had no tenable justification to mislead a nation. I have pointed out many plausible reasons why he would do precisely that....none of which you have been able to refute.
Well, the fact that the president did not require public approval for his actions, is evidence he had no tenable justification to lie. And even IF you could create some tenable justification to lie, you can't logically justify a lie with no basis, in this situation, where the net end result is guaranteed to be a negative. It completely defies logic that Bush would lie, and it defies logic even more, that he would tell lies which could so easily be disproved.
The only potential tenable justification you can come up with, is his political ambition, which I think we can both safely say, is toast now. So, what did he gain in telling these lies that were so obvious, with regard to his political career? Why would any strategist figure on any other potential result of deliberately lying to the American public? Your premise makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, in fact, if Bush was concerned about his political career, it would be justification for him to NOT lie, or say anything that could even remotely be viewed as a lie.
OK...Dixie.... regardless of Bush's legal authority to launch the war against Saddam with no congressional approval and no public support, he would have been a complete fool to do so, don't you think? Can you just imagine if there had been no public debate about the war whatsoever and, out of the blue, Bush kicks the UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq and launches Shock and Awe? What would have happened? He would have been hounded from office and soundly trounced by Howard Dean in '04 and the republicans would have been swept from office.
But he SO wanted to invade Iraq. His entire team of senior advisors - Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie, Perle had all spent a great deal of time planning that very thing..they wrote about it in a document they were quite proud of. PNAC's manifesto is some powerful stuff.
Osama gave the neocons their Pearl Harbor. 9/11 became the justification to finally get the ball rolling on the whole PNAC agenda. We know that, immediately after 9/11. Secretary of State Powell had to forcefully put the brakes on RUmmy who wanted to bypass the whole "Let's go to Afghanistan and get Osama" ruse and invade Saddam right then! THose neocons were just chomping at the bit to start moving...they had flowering multicultural Jeffersonian deomcracies to build on the banks of the Tigris and EuUphrates..they had an entire world paradigm to shift.
But the American people were still really mad at Osama...and this group called Al Qaeda. They failed to comprehend just how beautiful and wonderful the world would be when the multicultural Jeffersonian democracy was flourishing and we had this wonderful oil-soaked ally smack dab in the middle of the middle east.... but the neocons felt CERTAIN that the benefits of that paradigm shift that they would cause would be so self evident to Americans and the entire world that they needed to push it forward...use the anger and the fear and the vengefullness of the American people - channel it... and let it be the impetus for this glorious change.
The neocons thought: If only we could conflate Saddam with Osama... Iraq and 9/11.... then the anger and the fear would be focused on Iraq and away we'd go.
And then we lost Osama.... and then they said he was dead...or dying...or on dialysis...or dead...or dying in a cave somewhere...but then WHOA... there was a video of him talking about current events and taunting us... and then there was an audio tape...and the CIA said it wasn't him..and then they said it was... and America began to get restless and impatient... and then, in the fall of 2002, Bush and Cheney and Rummy and Wolfie and Perle all began giving speeches... and those speeches all had the following words in them: 9/11 (blah blah blah) Iraq (blah blah blah)Weapons of Mass Destruction (blah blah blah) Al Qaeda (blah blah blah) Saddam (blah blah blah) 9/11 (blah blah blah) Iraq (blah blah blah)Weapons of Mass Destruction (blah blah blah) Al Qaeda (blah blah blah) Saddam ...over and over and over and over and over and over and over again
AND NEVER ONCE MENTIONED OSAMA BIN LADEN!!!!! They were quite careful to never actually SAY that Saddam had planned and executed 9/11...but funny thing... after five months of speeches like that to a country of folks who KNEW on 9/13/01 who attacked them, and then, over half of them then KNEW that Saddam was behind 9/11 all along.
Everything was in place. It looked like a cakewalk. Apply a little shock and awe...send the overwhelmingly superior US military into Iraq... run on up to Baghdad crushing tons of rose petals strewn under the treads of our tanks by thankful Iraqis... grab Saddam... hold some elections... write a constitution... erect some statues of George Bush in prominent locations throughout the country... watch the multicultural jeffersonian democracy blossom... start pumping the oil and start planning out the next ten republican presidential inaugurations. WMD's??? WHo the fuck would care that we didn't find WMD's when the multicultural jeffersonian democracy was blossoming on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates - when Exxon was putting a steady suction on the Iraqi oil fields?
That's why they told us there was no doubt that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that they even knew exactly where they were... because when their grand plan came to fruition, the absence of WMD's would be lost in the noise of the world cheering its new heroes and its new rulers.
Ooops.