Terminus on Bush’s nuclear lies:
So Bush needed the nuke angle to help him make his case, even though he must have known that it was, at best, a colossal stretch of the available intelligence. Clever allusions to the nuclear threat were inserted into the standard talking points in support of the war. Condi Rice warned that the first “smoking gun” we see could be a mushroom cloud. And on March 16, three days before the war began, Dick Cheney went so far as to tell Tim Russert, on Meet the Press, that Iraq had reconstituted nuclear weapons.
That goes beyond intentional exaggeration of the available intelligence. That’s fear- mongering: scaring the living shit out of Americans until they agreed to support the war. That’s not leadership, it’s more like a form of moral/psychological extortion.